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IN QUEST OF LIGHT 



BY 
GOLDWIN SMITH 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1906 

All rights reserved 



LIBRARY of congress/ 
Two CoDies Received 

MAV 1 1906 

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Copyright, 1906, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1906. 



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PREFACE 

A SECULAR journal in England received, in 
the course of three months, nine thousand 
communications from people seeking for light 
on the religious question. The question, then, 
is evidently practical. 

Never before has there been such a crisis in 
the history of belief. Never before has man, 
enlightened as he now is by Science, faced 
with a free mind the problem of his origin and 
destiny. 

The following papers were penned with the 
same desire of light as those of the nine thou- 
sand. They appeared in different forms, chiefly 
as letters, in the New York Sun, to the cour- 
tesy and courage of whose editor the best 
thanks of the writer are due. 

It seems that some of those who read them 
have wished to refer to them again. They are 
printed as they appeared, without attempt, 
which would have been vain, to give the series 
a literary form. 



VI PREFACE 

No theory is here propounded. The writer's 
aim is to help, if he can, in clearing the posi- 
tion, pointing to the right line of inquiry, 
and guarding against false lures. To this end 
inquiry and thought must be free. Reason 
must rule. It is, as Bishop Butler frankly 
says, "the only faculty we have wherewith to 
judge concerning anything, even revelation 
itself." Its voice, therefore, is that of our 
Maker. Faith, which is an emotion, cannot 
supersede or contradict reason, though it may 
soar above sense. To know what remains to 
us of our traditional belief we must frankly 
resign that which, however cherished, the 
progress of science and learning has taken 
away. But destruction will not be found to 
be the object of the writer. Nor, it is to be 
hoped, will there be found in him any appear- 
ance of irreverence. Nothing can be farther 

from his heart. 

G. S. 

Toronto, March 20, 1906. 



CONTENTS 



LETTER 
I. 


Church-going Scepticism 






II. 


The Immortality of the Soul 






III. 


The Immortality of the Soul 






IV. 


Haeckel 






V. 


Between two Fires 






VI. 


A New Theory of Immortality 






VII. 


The Bee versus Man . 






VIII. 


The Immortality of the Soul 






IX. 


The Immortality of the Soul 






X. 


Easter 






XI. 


Easter 






XII. 


Is Religion Worthless? 






XIII. 


The Crimes of Christendom . 






XIV. 


Does Christianity fall with Dogma? 


XV. 


Sabatier on Religions of Authority . 


XVI. 


The Tendencies of Religious Th 


OUGH 


T 



XVII. The Bible: its Critics and its Defenders 
XVIII. Is Christianity Dead or Dying? . 



PAGE 
V 



I 

5 

8 

II 

i6 

19 

27 

37 
42 
48 
54 
59 
62 
68 
73 
83 
88 

94 



VIU CONTENTS 

LETTER 

XIX. The Two Theories of Life 

XX. Telepathy 

XXI. Spiritual versus Supernatural 

XXII. A Problem greater than Telepathy 

XXIII. Dr. Osler on Science and Immortality 

XXIV. Dispensing with the Soul . 
XXV. The Religious Situation . 

XXVI. Is Materialism Advancing? 

XXVII. Doubt and its Fruits. 

XXVIII. The Anglican Petition for Freedom 

XXIX. The Remedy for Religious Doubt . 

XXX. The Origin of Life .... 

XXXI. Rational Christianity 

XXXII. Free Thought and Churchmanship . 

XXXIII. Religion and Morality 

XXXIV. The Conference of the Churches . 
XXXV. What do We Owe to the Old Testament? 

XXXVI. Justice Hereafter .... 

XXXVII. Our Present Position 



98 
103 
107 
no 
114 
118 
121 
126 
131 
136 
141 

145 
148 
151 
155 
159 
164 
170 
173 



IN QUEST OF LIGHT 



IN QUEST OF LIGHT 



XHURCH-GOING SCEPTICISM 

One clergyman, it seems, denies the infallibility 
of the Bible, and treats the Church as an asso- 
ciation for general improvement. A second finds 
in the Bible inaccuracy and worse. A third pro- 
fesses to believe only so much of the Bible as com- 
mends itself to his judgment. A correspondent 
of the New York Sun rebukes one of them 
for indiscretion in the publication of truth. At the 
same time he says himself that the truth may be 
rightly told in private conversation. For his own 
part he regards church-going as a ^^ moral tonic, 
and a mental bath," adding that ^4t is often not 
comfortable to get up and take a sponge bath 
with cold water, in a cold room, but lacking better 
facilities you must do it if you would be de- 
cent among your friends and agreeable to your- 
self." The eminent clergyman might perhaps be 



2 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

justified in retorting on his critic the charge of 
indiscreet disclosure. 

How many church-goers are there to whom 
church-going is merely a moral and mental sponge 
bath, which they take without any definite belief 
in the doctrine, that they may be decent among 
their friends, and agreeable to themselves? How 
many are there who, dissembling in public, tell 
the truth in private conversation? If the num- 
ber is large, the end cannot be far off, and this 
hollow crust of outward conformity may presently 
fall in with a crash all the greater for delay. 

A layman has only to sit and listen to the 
sermon. But a clergyman has actively to pro- 
fess and preach the doctrines. If he has ceased 
to believe them, what is he to do? I never 
could regard without entire aversion the notion 
of certain illuminists that truth was the privilege 
of the enlightened few while tradition was the 
lot of the crowd. But the most fatal part of 
the arrangement was that it dedicated the clergy 
to falsehood. 

Caution and tenderness are most necessary in 
dealing with religious questions, seeing to how 
great an extent religion has formed the basis of 



CHURCH-GOING SCEPTICISM 3 

morality. But scepticism has now spread so far, 
not only among the learned, but among mechanics, 
that the policy of silence or dissimulation, sup- 
posing it were sound, is no longer possible. There 
is nothing for it now but perfectly free inquiry 
and frank acceptance of results. Caution and 
tenderness will always be in order, but they are 
not incompatible with sincerity. 

What is the consequence of silence or dissimu- 
lation on the part of earnest and reverent in- 
quirers? It is the abandonment of free inquiry 
to reckless and profane hands, with such results 
as the ^Xomic Life of Christ," which I picked up 
in an anti-clerical bookstore at Paris. I heard 
Mr. IngersoU lecture on Genesis. He was very 
brilliant, and highly effective, but he destroyed 
reverence as well as superstition. 

"Do not pull down, but build up," is the cry. 
How can we build upon a site incumbered with 
false tradition? All truth, negative as well as 
positive, is constructive; no falsehood is. I see 
Henry Newman preferred to his brother Francis 
on the ground that Henry was organic, and 
Francis was not. What did Henry organize? 
A house of mediaeval dreams, in which he could 



4 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

not force himself to believe without the help of 
such an apparatus of self-obscuration as the 
"Grammar of Assent." The "Grammar of As- 
sent" can only enhance scepticism by its inevitable 
fall. Francis Newman, if he did nothing else, 
cleared the ground for construction,, and he helped 
to lay firmly the foundation of all genuine faith, 
thorough-going confidence in Truth. 

The three eminent clergymen, it is to be feared, 
are sliding down a slippery incline, on which no 
permanent foothold is to be found. 

January, 1896. 



II 

THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 

The theological discussion carried on in the 
Sun, apparently by practical men anxious to 
arrive at truth, has been in that respect more 
interesting than the discussions of professional 
theologians. One of the subjects was the validity 
of the evidence for a future life, which Johnson, 
orthodox as he was, could not help feeling to be 
defective. It is a question not only profoundly 
interesting, but intensely practical, as well in its 
social as in its religious bearing. Without a 
belief in consequences of conduct beyond the 
present life, moral responsibility in the full sense 
of the term can hardly exist. Apart from indi- 
vidual interest there can only be social respon- 
sibility, which would hardly control the unsocial 
and selfish natures, whereof there are not a few. 
The cultivation of character, independently of 
present social requirements, would lose its object, 
since the best of characters formed by lifelong 

5 



6 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

effort and self-denial would, equally with that 
formed by lifelong crime or sensuality, come to 
dust. Interest in the future of our race would 
lose its force; reason would bid each man aim 
simply at a comfortable passage through this life. 

It is not on the old ground that the doctrine 
of a future life can be sustained. Theologians 
in former days imagined that the soul was an 
entity apart from our physical frame, inserted 
into the body by a special act of divine power, 
pent in it during life, and set free from it by death, 
though still remaining its filmy counterpart. 
Bishop Butler, who has said in the most effective 
way all that there was to be said from his point 
of view, argues that the soul, or as he calls it the 
*' conscious being," is indivisible, indiscerptible, 
and, therefore, presumably uneffected by the dis- 
solution of the body. But we have now learned 
to believe that there is nothing in us which is not 
the outcome of our general frame, and presumably 
hable, with our general frame, to dissolution at 
death. 

Yet there is a voice within us which tells us 
that in the sum of things it will be well with 
virtue, and that the effort and self-denial expended 



THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL ;' 

in the promotion of a good and beautiful character 
will not have been expended in vain. No man, 
I suppose, at the end of life, whatever his course 
and whatever his success had been, would not 
wish that his life had been righteous. If you ask 
me how this can be without the existence of the 
soul as an entity separate from the body, the body 
being liable to dissolution, my answer is that I 
cannot tell. But I do not on that account refuse 
to listen to a genuine prompting of my nature, 
if this be one, merely because it is not confirmed 
by the evidence of sense. Our whole being is a 
mystery. Try to realize in thought eternity and 
infinity, and you become conscious of that fact. 
Our sense probably tells us little more of the uni- 
verse in which we are than sense tells the pur- 
blind mole, which no doubt thinks it sees all that 
there is to be seen. We are happily casting off 
superstition, but there may be still some scope 
for faith. Not for the faith which would reject 
or supplant reason, but for the faith which is 
the evidence of things unseen. 

September, 1899. 



Ill 

THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 

In using such a phrase as "the immortality 
of the souP' we put the question on a wrong 
footing; for the phrase seems to imply that the 
soul is an entity separate from our general frame, 
and this can no longer be maintained. 

But admitting that the soul is not a separate 
entity, does it follow that any intimation in our 
nature of accountability or hope extending beyond 
our present life must be an illusion and ought to 
be disregarded? I do not wish to dogmatize or 
even to affirm, but simply to submit the question. 

One of your correspondents holds that the 
question is settled by physical science, which pro- 
nounces that personal decease is final. All physi- 
cal science rests upon the evidence of our bodily 
senses, however systematized by our reason. 
Have we ground for assuming that the evidence 
of our bodily senses is exhaustive? 

We recognize the immense revelations of science 

8 



THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 9 

in all their bearings, and especially in their bear- 
ing on the origin and nature of man. But is 
there not some danger of our being swept away 
by a tidal wave? The doctrine of evolution has 
been carried to the length of imagining an evolu- 
tion of Revelation. 

I am not aware that science has yet explained 
conscious personality, or attempted to explain it, 
otherwise than as a collection of memories. On 
such collection there must surely be something 
to reflect and operate. 

Huxley at one time confidently maintained 
that man was an automaton. But I believe he 
afterward receded from that position. 

Tyndall, with whom I was so happy as to be 
very intimate, always avowed himself a materialist. 
His was the formula that matter contained the 
potentiality of all life. Yet he would have found 
it difficult to account on merely material grounds 
for some of his own sentiments and aspirations. 

If all ends here, considering what an amount 
of unmerited and uncompensated misery and 
suffering there has been and still is, it would be 
difficult to confute Schopenhauer, who tells us 
that this is the worst, not of all conceivable, but 



10 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

of all possible, worlds. It would be difficult also 
to show that the individual has any inducement to 
exert himself for the general and future good of 
mankind, or that there is anything to restrain 
him from doing whatever may tend to his own 
profit or enjoyment without regard to the inter- 
ests of humanity, provided he can keep clear of 
the law. Moral responsibility in the true sense 
of the term, as I said before, would apparently 
cease. Belief in an all-powerful, all-wase, and 
benevolent ruler of the universe, it would seem, 
could no longer be maintained. 

September, 1899. 



IV 

HAECKEL 

It is not wonderful that the masterly account 
of Haeckel's philosophy given by a well-known 
writer in the Sun should have been read with 
interest and set other pens at work. It may 
confirm belief in Haeckel's creed, perhaps make 
some converts to it. Physical science has been 
achieving dazzling victories while theology and 
philosophy are for the time at a discount. Ultra- 
physicism is the ruling influence of the hour. 

We heartily and gratefully accept the revela- 
tions of physical science, casting away all tradi- 
tions, cosmogonical, anthropological, or of any 
other kind, which its discoveries have disproved. 
But before we resign ourselves to its exclusive 
dominion we may take time at least to look round. 
One or two grounds for hesitation may be men- 
tioned. It is not pretended here to do more. 
The knowledge of the universe, or of the particle 

of it which we inhabit, is that received through 

II 



12 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

our bodily senses. Is it certain that these are our 
only trustworthy sources of knowledge? If our 
moral perceptions are natural, ought they to be 
put out of court? In approaching these ques- 
tions we cannot help being filled with a sense of 
our immense ignorance and of the possibilities 
beyond our physical ken. This universe, as we 
call it, which physical science observes, including 
the remotest telescopic stars, is but an atom in in- 
finity. It is less than an atom ; for an atom bears 
some proportion to the mass, while our universe 
can bear no proportion to infinity. What physi- 
cal science calls laws and bids us venerate as 
supreme, however they may bound and control 
our lives, are not laws, but only phenomenal 
uniformities, unless there is a Lawgiver; and if 
there is a Lawgiver, who can say that his action 
generally or in relation to us does not transcend 
his physical laws? No one can be more strictly 
scientific than Mr. Herbert Spencer ; yet he recog- 
nizes the Unknown as an object of reverence, 
and it is not through any physical organ that he 
can perceive the existence of the Unknown. 

The freedom of the human will in any degree and 
however qualified by the influence of character 



HAECKEL 13 

and circumstance, would seem fatal to the mate- 
rialist hypothesis as establishing the existence 
of a force independent of physical causation. 
It is, accordingly, altogether and peremptorily 
denied. The powers of physical causation we 
can inspect; we can see that there is nothing 
between the impact and the shock, between the 
composition of the ingredients and the compound. 
The process of moral causation we cannot inspect. 
Between the ascertainable determinants and the 
result there is room for another factor. The 
only appeal is to our consciousness; and our 
consciousness tells us plainly that we are free. 
Responsibility would otherwise be an illusion. 
If we are really automata, how came we to fancy 
ourselves free? 

Against the belief in the immortality of the soul 
it is said that eternity transcends thought, and 
that the attempt to conceive it and identify our 
conscious existence with it only produces mental 
pain. This is true; but it is a merely psycho- 
logical difficulty. Let us discard the word "im- 
mortality," which connotes eternity, and ask only 
whether we are sure that all ends here. If all 
does end here, what a scene is human history! 



14 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

What a scene is human life ! What can the 
Power be under whose dominion we are? Hux- 
ley wished, if nothing better was to come, that 
the globe might be shattered by a comet. Can 
we readily believe that when a man comes to die 
it makes no difference to him whether his life has 
been that of a benefactor of his kind or of a devil ? 

Evolution is an immense discovery, the most 
momentous probably ever made, though perhaps 
it has hardly yet settled down into its final form 
and limits. Yet may it not weigh on us too much ? 
That we have been evolved from anthropoid apes 
is the conclusion of science, and we accept it, 
as once we believed that man had been made out 
of the dust of the earth, it might be radium. 
Still, we are what we are, not apes, but men. 

Evolution itself seems to preclude finality. 
Where physical selection ends, moral selection 
may begin. Perfection and beauty of character, 
which, we seem to feel, have a value apart from 
their mere social usefulness, may also have ends 
unseen. 

These remarks, however, are merely a plea for 
circumspection and against giving up ourselves 
blindly to ultra-physicism while we fly from 



HAECKEL 1 5 

tradition and superstition. Such caution is spe- 
cially to be desired, as ultra-physicism is evidently 
beginning to affect morality, particularly in rela- 
tion to the duty of strong nations and races 
towards the weak. 

April, 1901. 



V 

BETWEEN TWO FIRES 

I FIND myself between two fires : the Darwinian 
and the Dominican. But I fancy that my posi- 
tion is that of a good many thoughtful men who 
have renounced superstition but are not ready 
to go the whole length of materialism without 
further light. Even on social grounds the pros- 
pect of a reign of commercialism without con- 
science is enough to make us pause. 

I have not asserted that the phenomena of 
moral responsibility are incapable of physical 
explanation. I have only said that they exist, 
and that it is incumbent upon the materialist to 
explain them. They are not explained by mere 
reiteration, however vehement and positive, of 
the necessarian hypothesis. 

We are ready to accept heartily and gratefully, 
if not always joyfully, whatever is proved by 
physical science. It may be that the evidence 

i6 



BETWEEN TWO FIRES 1/ 

of our consciousness is an illusion. Prove this, 
and we will accept the fact. 

Tyndall maintained that in matter was the 
potentiality of all life. Of the existence, however, 
of something beyond physical life his own charac- 
ter and aspirations always seemed to me to be 
a very striking indication. 

To turn to my critics from the other side. I 
do not entertain, and therefore I cannot have 
shown, any bad feeling toward Roman Catholics, 
among whom I have numbered some of my most 
valued friends. I have admitted that truth 
may conceivably be found with those whose faith 
is based on Church authority and miracle. But 
it would be absurd to number among rational- 
ists any who believe in infallibility, ecclesiastical 
miracles, and transubstantiation. If I were pressed 
on the subject of the evidence for miracles, I 
would direct the attention of "Catholic Student'* 
to the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius, 
which takes place annually almost under the eyes 
of the Pope. 

It could not be supposed that I intended to 
accuse Cardinal Newman of unveracity or deceit. 
His conduct as a convert to Catholicism at heart, 



1 8 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

carrying on his movement in a Protestant church, 
was perhaps not always perfectly ingenuous. 
But all that I meant was that his aim as a specu- 
lative theologian was rather religious system than 
truth. He used his powers of persuasion to bend 
your reason to that which he had made up his 
mind was good for your soul. In the opening 
of "Tracts for the Times" he lets you see that 
in reviving the doctrines of apostolic succession 
and the eucharistic real presence he was seeking 
to furnish a fresh ground for clerical authority 
when the support of the State was being with- 
drawn. Nobody doubts the excellence of his 
character or the purity of his spiritual aspirations 
any more than his genius as a writer. Sophis- 
tical reasoning has often been found compatible 
with honesty of purpose and sincerity of belief. 
It was so in the case of Cardinal Newman. 

April, 1901. 



VI 

A NEW THEORY OF IMMORTALITY 

The last attempt to make evolution, like the 
fabled spear of Achilles, cure the wounds which 
it has made in our religious faith is Dr. S. D. 
McConnell's remarkable essay on "The Evolution 
of Immortality." 

The faith in which most men now over middle 
age grew up, and which churches still preach, 
is that man is distinguished from all other animals 
by the possession of a soul separate from his body 
and generally antagonistic to the body and its 
lusts ; that at death the souls of all men alike are 
parted from their bodies, but will be united to 
them at the Day of Judgment, when there will 
be a final division of the wicked from the good, 
the good going to everlasting bliss, the wicked to 
everlasting woe. To this rationalism now objects 
at once on scientific and on moral grounds. 
On scientific grounds, it denies that man is 
essentially distinguished from the higher races 

19 



20 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

of animals; affirming that the soul, instead of 
being separate from the body and introduced 
into it by a special act of the Creator, is the out- 
come of our general frame. On moral grounds 
it objects to the utter disproportion of infinite 
rewards and penalties to finite merits or demerits, 
and to the assumption of a sharp distinction be- 
tween the good and the wicked characters passing 
by infinite gradations into each other. 

The result is a growing tendency to disregard 
anything beyond the present life, or at least to 
agree with Horace Greeley in thinking that "those 
who discharge promptly and faithfully all their 
duties to those who still live in the flesh, can have 
but little time left for prying into the life beyond 
the grave; and that it is better to deal with each 
in its proper order." On the other hand, though 
in the whirl of business or pleasure we may be 
willing, like Macbeth, to '^jump the world to 
come," in the hour of reflection we cannot help 
shrinking from annihilation. To the Greek poet 
it was a sad thought that while the lowliest herb 
might have a second spring, man, the mighty and 
the wise, must sleep forever in his cold, dark 
grave. The strain might have been more melan- 



A NEW THEORY OF IMMORTALITY 21 

choly still if the poet had thought not only of the 
extinction of the individual, but of the severance 
of affection. The sight and the retrospect of 
human pain and misery, if there is to be no com- 
pensation, are heartrending. They are a heavy 
set-off against release from the fear of eternal 
fire, the belief in which has probably always been 
faint, since, had it been vivid, society would have 
been dissolved with terror. Immortality, in the 
strict sense of the term, as it connotes eternity, is, 
like eternity and infinity, inconceivable. But the 
social effect of a belief in a future state has most 
likely been greater than is by Dr. McConnell, or 
generally, believed. It has in some degree balanced 
the absorbing pursuit of wealth. It has in some 
degree taken the sting from social injustice, and 
reconciled the masses to the unequal distribution 
of this world's goods. If it has not made men in 
general prefer the next world to the present, it has 
helped to prevent them from seeking their ad- 
vancement in the present world by cutting throats 
or purses. So at least thought Voltaire, whose 
evidence on this point may be deemed impartial. 
In fact, the authority of conscience depends on 
the belief that whatever may happen to us in the 



22 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

present dispensation, in the sum of things it will 
certainly be well for him who has done good, and 
ill for him who has done evil. Lay aside that 
belief, and conscience will apparently lose its 
authority; there will be no moral influence but 
that of enlarged expediency, with its social embodi- 
ments in custom or the law. Of the social con- 
sequences of this change, we seem, as has already 
been said, to be having some premonitory symp- 
toms. 

Dr. McConnell takes the bull by the horns. 
True it is, he says, that the common view of im- 
mortality is totally untenable; true it is that, as 
science tells us, the soul is not an entity separate 
from the body and enclosed in it by a special 
fiat of the Almighty, but simply the outcome 
of our general frame ; true it is that man as a race 
is not essentially distinguished from other animals, 
which show in a rudimentary form mental faculties 
and perhaps sentiment identical with those of man. 
But the Doctor's theory is that the common herd 
of men are not capable of immortality. The 
common herd of men have no right or claim to it. 
As animals they have had their life, and this is 
their whole due. Those only are capable of 



A NEW THEORY OF IMMORTALITY 23 

immortality who by a process of evolution have 
risen to a higher kind of life, not racial, but individ- 
ual and spiritual, which qualifies them for the 
transition. In the Doctor's newly minted phrase- 
ology, man is not '^immortal," but only "immor- 
table"; that is, capable of immortahty. The 
distinguished few will mount from the present state 
of being to another, not reunited to their terres- 
trial bodies, but, as dwellings of some kind souls 
must have, invested with bodies of that luminif- 
erous or interstellar ether, the existence of which 
Newton divined and recent science has established. 
The common herd will mingle with the sod, as 
beseems their meagre speech, their shallow lives, 
their brutality and mischievousness, their low 
desires and ideals of life, and their blank insen- 
sibility to any moral appeal. Calvin could hardly 
exceed the ruthlessness of the demarcation. What 
sets on foot the evolution of the chosen few Dr. 
McConnell has not clearly explained to us; nor 
can his theory be said to be entirely free from the 
arbitrariness of the common belief in regard to 
the distribution of final bliss and woe, though it 
has the advantage of not consigning the rejected 
to everlasting fire. He admits that he is puzzled 



24 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

by the case of those who are not adults. He 
must be equally puzzled by the case of those who 
die in an early and imperfect stage of their evolu- 
tion. 

Dr. McConnell has the satisfaction of think- 
ing that his theory is in perfect harmony with 
Christianity, and even that the true meaning of 
the teaching of Christ and his Apostles on the 
subject of a future state is now for the first time 
made to appear. Marvellous, he says, is the agree- 
ment between his views and the words of Jesus. 
The words of Jesus and those of St. Paul and 
other apostolic writers on this subject especially 
are so little precise, they are so much more homi- 
letic than dogmatic, that very different meanings 
may without much difficulty be read into them. 
But in this case, as with regard to the theory 
of an evolutionary Revelation, it must surely strike 
us as strange that. Revelation having been given 
for the enlightenment and salvation of mankind, 
the real key to it should have been withheld from 
so many generations of men and brought to light 
at last by the voyage of the Beagle, 

Dr. McConnell, as well as the believer in the 
common doctrine, is confronted by the fact that, 



A NEW THEORY OF IMMORTALITY 2$ 

no one having ever appeared or been heard from 
after death, his theory lacks the one perfectly 
satisfactory verification. In meeting this objec- 
tion he dallies a little with telepathy, evidently 
feeling, however, that he is here upon slippery 
ground. More decidedly, though not with an 
assurance entirely orthodox, he professes his be- 
lief in the resurrection of Christ. The evidence 
of that event has been thoroughly sifted by criti- 
cism, and the conclusion to which free inquiries 
have come is sufficiently well known. But it is 
certain that if Jesus appeared after death to his 
disciples, it was not in a body of illuminated and 
interstellar ether, but in the body which had been 
laid in the grave. So all the Gospels tell us and 
all the Churches have believed. 

Without any special reference to the work of 
Dr. McConnell, it may be said that evolution 
is in danger, like other great discoveries, of be- 
coming a craze. For every problem, physical, 
moral, or theological, it is now made to furnish 
a solution. The theory is physical, and its illus- 
trious author neither presumed to extend it to 
anything not physical nor denied the possible 
existence in the universe or in man of things 



26 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

beyond the cognizance of our bodily senses. The 
very fact that our thoughts and aspirations range 
beyond earth and our present state, is a phe- 
nomenon challenging observation apart from the 
truth or falsehood of our ideas. Apes, beavers, 
ants, and bees undoubtedly do things which are 
curiously like the actions of men, and seem to 
bespeak an intelligence identical with ours; but 
we have no reason for believing that they look 
before and after, that they pine for what is not, 
or that they try to peer behind the veil. 
July, 1901. 



VII 

THE BEE VERSUS MAN 

"The Life of the Bee," by Maurice Maeter- 
linck, translated by Alfred Sutro, is a very beauti- 
ful book, though, in its dealing with a scientific 
subject, somewhat poetical, and occasionally bor- 
dering on rhapsody. The writer throughout 
manifestly glances from the bee to man, and 
seeks in the name of the bee to dispute man's 
exclusive claim to reason, forecast, and self- 
sacrifice in pursuit of an ideal, with whatever 
of still higher moment may hang thereby. That 
this is the main purport of the book it would per- 
haps be unsafe to say. One aspect of the book 
it certainly is, and it furnishes a distinct point 
for consideration. 

We are perhaps paying the penalty of having 

so long assumed that man was a being in his origin 

and nature distinct from all other creatures; 

that his reason was a prerogative entirely above 

their instinct; and that while they were nothing 

27 



28 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

but perishable clay, he had a soul separate from 
his body, destined to survive the body and to be 
reunited with its Maker. Evolution has over- 
turned this belief. It has told us that the mate- 
rial origin of man and beast, probably of the 
vegetable world also, is the same. It has told 
us that there is no generic distinction between 
instinct and reason, instinct being reason in a 
rudimentary stage. It has told us that what we 
took for a distinct entity and called the soul is 
in reality a development. We now seem inclined 
to pass to the opposite extreme, and at once to 
assume that where there is no corporeal distinc- 
tion, there can be no essential difference, and 
that if the soul is not a separate entity, spiritual 
life must be a dream. 

The embryo of a man and that of a dog, sci- 
ence tells us, are alike. From this scientific fact 
either of two inferences may apparently be drawn. 
It may be concluded either that there is no essen- 
tial difference between the man and the dog, or 
that the structure of the embryo is not decisive. 
If we were to go back to the nebula, whatever 
slight difference there might be would totally 
disappear. Let the origin and process of develop- 



THE BEE VERSUS MAN 29 

merit in the two cases have been what they may, 
we still are what we are. There can surely be 
no such thing as essential difference if it does 
not exist between a man and a dog. 

The habits of bees, as described by M. Maeter- 
linck, are marvellous in the highest degree; and 
not less marvellous are the scientific industry 
and acumen by which they have been explored. 
They are more wonderful, perhaps, than those of 
ants, beavers, or apes. Yet I fail to see in them 
anything which puts the bee at all on a level 
with civilized man. They all seem to me to be 
such as, without discursive intelligence or delib- 
erate effort, the drilling of environment and cir- 
cumstance, prolonged through aeons, may con- 
ceivably have produced. iEons must certainly 
be assumed for the purpose of evolution, if evo- 
lution is the creation of species by the improve- 
ment, through environment and circumstance, 
of accidental variations. We can hardly recog- 
nize as spontaneous effort for improvement the 
action of a bee in availing itself of a piece of ready- 
made wax which had been put in its way. Of 
course we cannot credit the insects with anything 
that has been done for them by man; with 



30 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

anything at least beyond the acceptance of new 
conditions. A general estimate of what has been 
done for the hive by man would make our view 
of the subject more complete. 

The actions and productions characteristic of 
man, his political and social experiments, his 
scientific investigations, his mathematics, his lit- 
erature, his poetry, his art, cannot be ascribed 
to mere drilling by environment and circumstance ; 
they are the work of conscious effort and discur- 
sive intelligence. 

The ^^ spirit of the hive" is a term habitually 
employed by M. Maeterlinck. But can it be 
said to be warranted? Routine necessary to 
subsistence, though unvarying, can hardly be 
called *^ spirit" or compared with a consciousness 
of duty to the nation and humanity such as exists, 
however imperfectly or fitfully, in communities 
of civilized men and rising to its highest level in 
the great benefactors of the race. "The god 
of the bees is the future." Making due allow- 
ance for the metaphor, we cannot help asking 
on what this assumption rests. What idea of 
the future or of anything but the interests and 
operations of their own time and hive can the 



THE BEE VERSUS MAN 3 1 

insects be said ever to have displayed? We are 
asked if we have often "encountered an ideal more 
conformable to the desires of the universe, more 
widely manifest, more disinterested or sublime, 
or an abnegation more complete and heroic." 
But the question surely is whether, in the his- 
tory of the bees, we have encountered an ideal 
at all, as we certainly have in the history of man. 
A general ideal of the progress and destiny of 
their race they can hardly have if their sympathy 
and cooperation are entirely confined, as M. 
Maeterlinck tells us, to the b^es of their own hives ; 
if between the different hives, even those of the 
same origin, there is no sympathy or connection 
whatever. Nor does it seem that there can be 
any pervading sense of a community of race like 
our sense of a common humanity, when, as M. 
Maeterlinck tells us, you may crush, a few steps 
from their dwelling, twenty or thirty bees that 
have all issued from the same hive, and you will 
find that those which are left untouched will not 
even turn their heads. 

The vegetable world, too, has its wonders. 
"We are struck,'* says M. Maeterlinck, "by the 
genius that some of our humblest flowers display 



32 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

in contriving that the visit of the bee shall infallibly 
procure them the cross-fertilization they need.'' 
He bids us see ^^the marvellous fashion in which 
the orchis Moris combines the flag of its rostellum 
and retinacula; observe the mathematical and 
automatic inclination and adhesion of its polynia; 
the unerring double see-saw of the anthers of 
the wild sage, which touch the body of the visiting 
insect at a particular spot in order that the insect 
may in its turn touch the stigma of the neighbor- 
ing flower at another particular spot; and, in 
the case of the Pedicularis sylvatica, the succes- 
sive calculated movements of its stigma." Do 
not these contrivances almost rival the bee's 
hexagon? Might not such phrases as guiding 
"spirit" and devotion to the "future" as "god" 
be applied to these plants as reasonably as to the 
bee? 

That the hive bees have been developed out 
of lower, less gregarious, and less communistic 
races, seems certain; to that extent a claim of 
progress must be allowed. On the other hand, 
Egyptian monuments appear to demonstrate that 
there has been no material change in the structure 
of the comb for many thousands of years. And 



THE BEE VERSUS MAN 33 

now perfect monotony appears to reign ; one hive 
is the counterpart of another. In human common- 
wealths meanwhile there have been immense 
changes; and there is now a great variety, the 
result of struggle more or less pronounced for the 
attainment of a higher state. 

It is hardly safe to assume that when animals 
do anything conducive to the advantage of the 
tribe they do it with understanding. Stags fight 
in the rutting season. Their fighting conduces 
to the selection of the best sire for the herd. But 
can they be said to fight with that intention ? 

Is reason in the human sense of the term pos- 
sible without language? Is sustained progress 
possible without writing? Bees evidently do 
communicate as well as cooperate with each other, 
but it seems to be only in the most rudimentary 
way and about a most limited range of subjects. 
They certainly do not write or in any way record 
their thoughts and experiences so as to store 
them for posterity. 

Defects, such as the massacre of the males, 
the author admits. But a superior being, looking 
down upon the ways of men, would, M. Maeter- 
linck says, see great defects there also. He would 



34 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

see idle wealth lodged in luxurious palaces, indus- 
trious poverty lodged in hovels. However, looking 
close, he would see that not all wealth is idle, 
and that its attainment was the incentive to labor. 
But he would see, moreover, that man was always 
struggling against the defects of society, that in 
the higher communities philanthropy was at work, 
that plans of reform were on foot, that dreams 
of social perfection were being dreamed. Is 
there anything analogous to this in the common- 
wealth of the bees? Is there the slightest reason 
for supposing that they take thought for the im- 
provement and elevation of their race? 

It is in the "nuptial flight '^ that the writer's 
poetry rises to its highest pitch. Exact observa- 
tion of the union of the queen bee with the male 
chosen for the purpose of impregnation there 
can hardly have been, as it takes place in the sky. 
But accepting the description as it is given us, 
how can this momentary and coarse embrace, 
in which the entrails of the male are torn out 
and he perishes, bear comparison with romantic 
love and pure conjugal affection? It is true 
that romantic love and conjugal affection of the 
highest kind are found only in civilized man; 



THE BEE VERSUS MAN 35 

but in civilized man they are found, and men as 
a race are capable of civilization. 

^^Sad let it be/' says M. Maeterlinck, dismiss- 
ing a melancholy portion of his subject, "as all 
things in nature are sad vi^hen our eyes rest too 
closely upon them. And thus it ever shall be 
so long as we know not her secret, know not even 
whether secret truly there be. And should we 
discover some day that there is no secret or that 
the secret is monstrous, other duties will then 
arise that as yet perhaps have no name.'' There 
is no use in attempting to veil the fact, which 
is already casting its shadow over our life. 
Toward the belief that there is no secret or that 
the secret is monstrous, toward the belief, in 
other words, that the world is ruled by force with- 
out design, of which man and his history are a 
play, science and thought are at present tending. 
If this is the truth, we must bow, though the 
materialist can hardly expect us to rejoice, and 
make each of us the best we can of our brief lease 
of existence. Two things, however, may still 
be whispered on the other side. One is that the 
phenomena of what we have hitherto called man's 
spiritual nature, his sense of moral responsibility, 



36 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

his appreciation of moral beauty, his moral 
aspirations, his conception of a state beyond 
the present, the refinement of his affections, 
his poetry and art, his conscious and forecasting 
efforts for the improvement, moral as well as 
material, of himself and his race, in themselves 
claim consideration like other phenomena sub- 
mitted to science, whatever may be the physical 
genesis of man or the soundness of his particular 
conceptions. Another is that we have appar- 
ently no sufficient reason at present to conclude 
that there is nothing in the universe, or nothing 
cognizable by us, beyond that which is perceived 
by our bodily senses and is the subject of physical 
science. 

There is nothing, I hope, in what has now 
been said at variance with thorough loyalty to 
scientific truth or with just appreciation of a 
very interesting and charming book. 

August, 1901. 



VIII 

THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 

The battle with Tammany did not suspend the 
discussion in the Sun'^s columns of the immor- 
tality of the soul and its relation to morality. 
Nothing can be more intensely practical than 
this question. Since the decline of religious 
belief, morality has been dragging its anchor, 
and our state of transitional perplexity may be 
one source at least of much of the practical 
disturbance of the world. 

One bold thinker says that morality without 
immortality is a sentimental humbug. As an 
agnostic or an atheist, he claims the right of making 
his own moral law. Subjectively, no doubt, he 
has that right. Objectively he will find the 
limit of the right in the club of the nearest police- 
man. Whatever turn may ultimately be taken \ 
by our convictions about a hereafter, society will 
uphold by law or social influence rules necessary 
to its own security and convenience here. It may 

37 



38 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

even uphold them more rigorously than ever 
when it is convinced that the present life is 
all. The natural affections, parental, conjugal, 
and social, will also retain their force. 

So far, however, as conscience is concerned 
this dauntless agnostic is logical. Immortality is 
an idea which my mind fails to grasp, as it fails 
to grasp the ideas of eternity, infinity, omnipo- 
tence, or first cause. But if this life ends all, 
I do not see how conscience can retain its 
authority. The authority of conscience, it seems 
to me, is religious. The sanction of its awards 
appears to be something beyond and above 
temporal interest, utility, or the dictates of society 
and law. In the absence of such a sanction what 
can there be to prevent a man from following his 
own inclinations, good or bad, beneficent or mur- 
derous, so long as he keeps within the pale of law 
or manages to escape the police? One man is a 
lamb by nature, another is a tiger. Why is not 
the tiger as well as the lamb to follow his nature 
so far as the law will let him or as he has power? 
Eccelino, for instance, was by nature a devil 
incarnate, a sort of Satanic enthusiast of evil. 
What had merely utilitarian morality to say against 



THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 39 

his gratification of his propensities as long as he 
had power on his side? 

The age of Machiavel was something Kke ours, 
in being one of reHgious ecHpse attended by fail- 
ure of the traditional foundation of morality. 
A domination of self-interest without regard for 
moral restrictions was the result. 

I do not presume to put forward any hypothe- 
sis. I merely call attention to certain phenomena 
of humanity which seem at first sight to militate 
against the purely materialist view. Our power 
of choice in action, which, without belying our 
consciousness, cannot be denied; our consequent 
sense of responsibility; our moral aspirations and 
endeavors; our conceptions of a higher state of 
being and desire to press onward towards it ; all 
the phenomena, in a word, of what has hitherto 
been called our spiritual nature — by what pro- 
cess of physical evolution can we suppose these 
to have been produced? 

Heartily accepting evolution, I demur to the 
assumption that physical development is the 
end, as well as to the assumption that nothing 
of which our bodily senses are not cognizant can 
be true. 



40 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

Perfection may be produced by the fiat of 
Omnipotence. This clearly is not the constitu- 
tion of the universe, since the universe is full of 
imperfection. Physical progress may be made 
by evolution, which out of the worm has evolved 
the frame of man. But there is another mode 
of progress of which we are conscious in ourselves, 
and of which man's history, so far as it is progres- 
sive, is the outcome. This is intelligent effort. 
In fact, we can hardly understand any moral per- 
fection or excellence of character except as the 
product of effort. A seraph is insipidity with 
unanatomic wings. 

It constitutes for us a special interest in an- 
cient masters of ethics, Plato, Aristotle, Marcus 
Aurelius, and Epictetus, that, while they 
looked at human nature with eyes as clear 
as ours, they were without our special prepos- 
sessions. From the State polytheism they had 
broken away. Yet in all of them you find recog- 
nition of the character produced by moral effort 
and transcending mere utility. This is especially 
striking in Plato, who is so far from utilitarianism 
that he even looks on martyrdom as the natural 
meed of the righteous. It is less striking in 



THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 41 

Aristotle, whose ideal is an animated Greek 
statue, but still it is there. In Plato there is a 
distinct connection of virtue with a personal 
though unseen power of good. In Marcus Aure- 
lius and Epictetus the power is not personal, but 
there is a power. 

I have assumed that as agents we have liberty 
of choice. I eschew the term ^^free will," leaving 
it to the metaphysical angels in Milton's Hell. 
The necessarian hypothesis, seeing that the chain 
of causation stretches back indefinitely, must 
imply that all our actions were irrevocably set- 
tled in the very beginning of things. Not having 
seen the beginning of things, I cannot say; but 
unless my whole moral being is a delusion, I have 
liberty of choice. 

Frank acceptance of all proved truth, such as 
the general theory of evolution; caution in sur- 
rendering ourselves to the last great discovery; 
recognition and examination of all phenomena, 
not physical only, but of every kind, together 
form the compass to which we must look for 
guidance over a dark and perilous sea. 

December, 1901. 



IX 

THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 

The correspondents of the Sun still keep up 
the philosophic debate about the nature and 
destiny of man. No question can be more 
truly practical than that which concerns the 
authority of conscience and the basis of moral- 
ity, personal, social, and international. We are 
everywhere met by the effects of the present 
moral doubts and distractions. 

One of the correspondents, apparently a 
thorough- going necessarian, quotes in support of 
his theory a passage of Oliver Wendell Holmes : — 

"The more I have observed and reflected the more 
limited seems to me the field of action of the human will. 
Every act of choice involves a special relation between 
the ego and the conditions before it. But no man knows 
what forces are at work in the determination of his ego. 
The bias which decides his choice between two or more 
motives may come from some unsuspected ancestral source, 
of which he knows nothing at all. He is automatic in 
virtue of that hidden spring of reflex action, all the time 

42 



THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 43 

having the feeUng that he is self-determining. The story 
of Elsie Venner illustrates the direction in which my 
thought was moving. The imaginary subject of the story 
obeyed her will, but her will obeyed the mysterious ante- 
natal poisoning influence." 

This passage seems to me rather literary than 
philosophic. However, it says only that the 
human will or whatever it is that constitutes our 
moral responsibility is ^'limited." Nobody sup- 
poses that our Hberty of choice is unHmited or 
that the will operates in a vacuum. Necessarian- 
ism, I suspect, is at bottom merely a mental 
puzzle, which may perplex our conceptions, but 
does not affect our actions. No man practically 
applies it either to his own actions or to those of his 
fellows. The belief upon which we all act and by 
which we always judge actions is that of moral 
responsibility, which implies a freedom of choice, 
however limited. Achilles does overtake the 
tortoise in spite of a demonstration, apparently 
logical, that he will not ; and though we may have 
a logical difficulty in rebutting absolute causation 
we do deliberate and decide. For my part I 
must say that I do not expect to see the exact 
relation of will to preexisting character and 



44 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

circumstance stated in a precise and scientific form. 
Huxley had at one time got himself entangled 
in the notion that man was an automaton which 
had become automatically conscious of its own 
automatism; but I believe he shook it off in the 
end. 

Necessarianism, or a denial of the freedom of 
the will, appears to assume that there is only one 
element in action, the predisposing motive. Ap- 
peal to our consciousness seems to tell us that 
there are two: the antecedent motive and voli- 
tion. In ordinary action the duality is not per- 
ceived; in doubtful and hesitating action it is. 

Another of the correspondents seems to me, 
with all deference be it said, to exemplify the 
tendency of great discoveries, when victorious 
in their inevitable combat with prejudice, to pur- 
sue their victory too far. The discoverer of 
evolution, however, is not responsible for the 
present tendency to regard the nature of man 
as merely physical and to treat the community 
on that principle. Why should we not weed out 
the human herd as we do the herd of kine or the 
flock of sheep, killing off the unpromising and 
allowing only the more promising organizations 



THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 45 

to live? A sufficient reason, setting aside 
all mere traditional reverence for humanity, is 
that while in the case of the kine or the sheep we 
can see everything that is necessary to determine 
our selection, we cannot see that which is most 
necessary to determine our selection in the in- 
tellectual and moral being, man. The cor- 
respondent, if I rightly understand him, would 
have '^society" put to death the ^^ socially unfit" 
or disable them from propagation. What is 
"society" but the government? and what gov- 
ernment, even with the aid of the best experts, 
could see so far into the inner man as fitly to 
undertake the process of elimination? Where 
would the line between social fitness and unfitness 
be drawn ? What would be the outward signs of 
unfitness ? Those who are convicted of crime you 
might hang or subject to the alternative treatment 
suggested. But in the case of the unconvicted, 
what is your test ? How can you foresee develop- 
ment? Socrates confessed that it was through a 
hard struggle that he attained virtue. An ultra- 
evolutionist would have eliminated him in his 
first stage. Nero, on the other hand, set out 
well. 



46 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

A metaphysical book, it seems, has reached its 
eighth edition. This shows that a number of 
inquirers are still upon that track. Is there any 
hope in that direction ? Is it possible that mental 
introspection should lead us to objective truth? 
Might we not as well look for scientific fact in 
the structure of a scientific instrument, as for 
objective truth in the structure of the mind? 
Intellects of the highest order have been devoted 
to metaphysic; and with what result? From 
the Greek philosophers to the schoolmen, from 
the schoolmen to the Germans, system succeeds 
to system, without progress or -practical outcome. 
Even the reputed discoveries of Berkeley have 
borne no practical fruit, and Hegel is already as 
dead as Pythagoras. Meantime genuine science 
wins a series of practical triumphs and is ad- 
vanced even by partial errors. The datum 
assumed by metaphysic throughout is that 
reality must correspond to conception. No such 
assumption is involved in our belief in moral 
responsibility or other spiritual phenomena of 
human nature, which are facts of mental ex- 
perience and observation though not of bodily 
sense. 



THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 47 

We have specially to be on our guard against 
the attempts of some writers of the metaphysical 
school to shake the foundation of all scientific or 
rational belief, by reducing everything to philo- 
sophic doubt, and thus to place us at the mercy 
of orthodox tradition. Dean Mansel was sup- 
posed in his Oxford sermons, by demonstrating 
our inability to grasp the Unconditional or com- 
prehend divine morality, to have made scepticism 
slay itself with its own sword. Loud was the 
applause of orthodoxy. But one shrewd head of 
a college as he came away from the University 
Church, said, "I never expected to hear atheism 
preached from the pulpit of the university." 

January, 1902. 



X 

EASTER 

Easter revives the discussion of the immor- 
tahty of the soul, of which the Resurrection of 
Jesus is regarded by Christendom as the pledge, 
though the fact that Deity could not be holden 
of death would hardly in itself be a pledge that 
death shall not hold mere humanity. 

At Easter a year or two ago I heard a preacher 

speak of the Resurrection of Jesus as the best 

attested of all historical events. So far a fond 

adherence to tradition could carry him ! If the 

event really happened and is of such unspeakable 

importance as has been supposed, it would be 

reasonable, and more than reasonable, to expect 

not only that the evidence of it should be better 

than that of any other historical event, but almost 

that there should be a standing miracle of some 

sort to place it forever beyond the possibility of 

doubt. The fact, however, is that the narratives 

are anonymous ; that their authorship is unknown ; 

48 



EASTER 49 

that they are of uncertain date ; that they are hope- 
lessly at variance with each other. The attempts 
to harmonize them, such as that of Dr. Greswell, 
serve only to make the inconsistencies more 
glaring. Is it conceivable that the records of an 
event on which the salvation of mankind depends 
should be left to be cleared from doubt and con- 
fusion by the hermeneutic ingenuity of a divine 
in the nineteenth century? 

A personal impression, however strong, however 
deepened by Church art as well as by theology, is 
no evidence. It is inconceivable that the power 
which ordained such an event and for such a 
purpose should have left its authenticity to rest 
upon impressions. There can be no use in 
fondly clinging for support to that which itself 
cannot stand. Still the exclamation with which 
the Eastern Church hails Easter morning is true. 
As the Founder of Christendom, Christ is risen 
indeed. 

These questions, as has been said before, 
speculative as they may seem to those who deem 
themselves practical men, are really practical and 
urgent in the highest degree. The conscience 
which we have hitherto obeyed, or endeavored 



50 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

approximately to obey, and which has more or 
less kept the world in order, seems in its nature 
religious. It has claimed, and to some extent 
practically asserted, an authority beyond that of 
any earthly tribunal. It has proclaimed that it 
shall be well with those who do good and ill with 
those who do evil, not only in this transitory 
life. It has bidden the righteous, suffering from 
injustice here, appeal to a higher tribunal, and 
threatened the unrighteous on whom fortune in 
the present world smiles with a reversal of their 
lot hereafter. The most comprehensive view of 
our temporal interest, even though it may embrace 
the whole compass of our social affections, is not 
what we mean by conscience. 

Every day brings fresh proof of the fact that by 
the collapse of the traditional beliefs on which 
morality has hitherto largely rested morality itself 
is being shaken, so that there is a danger of a 
moral interregnum like that which there was 
between the fall of mediaeval Catholicism and the 
rise of Protestantism, aggravated, moreover, by 
the struggle for gain. The rule of conduct for 
nations toward each other threatens to be not 
antiquated righteousness, but conformity to the 



EASTER 51 

indications of the stars in their courses; in 
other words, seizure of all opportunities of ag- 
grandizement without regard to the rights of 
others. One cannot help respecting the memory 
of the Barbary corsair, who did not talk about the 
stars in their courses, or about duty taking the 
hand of destiny, or about a providential mission, 
but said frankly that he wanted his neighbors' 
goods, and if the owner tried to keep them he 
would knock him on the head. 

So eminent a thinker as Dr. Felix Adler regards 
personal immortality as a thing not to be desired, 
but as a thing to be dreaded. It involves, he 
says, endless suffering and interminable strug- 
gling toward some higher plane of existence 
which still always rises above you. His senti- 
ment appears to be somewhat like that of the 
Buddhist, who strives by intense self-effacement 
to escape from the burden of conscious personality 
and the interminable series of transformations. 
But if Dr. Felix Adler recoils from the prospect of 
personal immortality, does not he, or do not men 
in general, recoil from the prospect of personal 
annihilation ? Apart from our individual destiny, 
is it not sad to think of all the uncompensated 



52 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

suffering which, on the hypothesis that existence 
ends here, fills the pages of human history? Does 
death level not only the king with the beggar, 
but the best of men and the greatest benefactor 
of his kind with the worst of tyrants or assassins ? 
If it does, can we believe in the moral govern- 
ment of the world? If we cannot believe in the 
moral government of the world, where is the 
sanction of morality? 

Nor, again, can we contemplate without sor- 
row the prospect of final separation from those 
we love? 

Immortality, as has been said before, like 
infinity or eternity, transcends our power of con- 
ception. The attempt to realize it only produces 
a sort of dizziness in the mind. It seems better 
to set that term aside, and simply to consider 
whether it is certain or probable that all ends for 
us with death. There are phenomena in our 
nature which, apparently, are not physical, but 
seem to point to something beyond our physical 
existence. They constitute in the aggregate what 
we have called our spiritual life, including our 
sense of moral responsibility, our moral aspira- 
tions, our feeling for moral beauty, our power of 



EASTER 53 

idealization, our higher and more perfect human 
affections. Is there anything to which these 
point ? May there not still be something behind 
the veil? 

Clinging to tradition, however entwined the 
tradition may be with all our associations, is, in 
the face of the revelations of science and criticism, 
no longer possible. We are in danger of falling 
from that state into a blind and even fanatical 
materialism, which, if we could see behind the 
veil, might be found to be no more identical than 
tradition itself with the progressive purpose of 
the universe. 

April, 1902. 



XI 

EASTER 

No one whose life has not been devoted to the 
study can pretend to have read everything that 
has been written on either side about the author- 
ship, dates, and historical character of the Gos- 
pels. But I have read enough on both sides to 
convince me that the authorship and dates are 
doubtful; that the Gospels contain much unhis- 
toric matter ; and that they are often and seriously 
at variance with each other. The variations are 
especially marked and irreconcilable in the narra- 
tives of the Resurrection. Moreover, these nar- 
ratives are connected with such prodigies as the 
miraculous darkness, the rending of the veil of 
the Temple, and the apparitions of the dead in the 
streets of Jerusalem, which could not have oc- 
curred without making a tremendous impression or 
without leaving their trace in history. It may be 
true, as one of your correspondents says, that we 
cannot set limits to the action of Providence. But 

54 



EASTER 55 

we are surely justified in assuming that Providence 
would not, in communicating vital truths to men, 
contravene its own purpose by simulating the 
defects of human evidence. 

Besides, we have to meet the general objection 
to the whole supernatural system of which the 
Resurrection is an integral part. Science has 
indisputably proved that instead of being created 
perfect and falling from perfection, man rose by 
evolution from a lower organization to a higher; 
and if there was no Fall, how can there be room 
for the belief in the Incarnation and the Redemp- 
tion? 

It is a subject on which it may be painful to 
piety to dwell, but is it possible to follow in imagi- 
nation the details of the Incarnation, with the 
relations of the two natures to each other, both 
here on earth and after the Ascension, without 
feeling the impossibility of conception, and there- 
fore of belief? Newman desired his disciples 
specially to mark that it was Almighty God that 
endured the scourging; and Frederick Faber, 
one of Newman's circle, described the babe as 
sleeping in the mother's arms, when she had 
slaked its thirst and stilled its cry, yet with its 



56 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

sleeping eye seeing the universe, and all that was 
therein. We may repeat, but we cannot realize 
the creeds. Probably their theosophic authors 
did not, though their cosmogony was much 
narrower than ours. 

The sublimities of the Mosaic story of creation, 
in spite of some strongly anthropomorphic pas- 
sages, have wonderfully prolonged its hold. But 
its mythical character can no longer be denied 
by any one whose mind is open to scientific truth. 
In fact, of the orthodox clergy, not a few are ready 
to embrace the expedient of allegorical interpre- 
tation, which, it is needless to say, amounts to 
surrender of the case. 

This is said in no spirit of general scepticism 
or destructiveness, but very much the reverse. 
It surely is worse than vain to cling to dead beliefs. 
Our only hope of salvation lies in the full and 
hearty, though reverent and discriminating, ac- 
ceptance of that which is now the revealed truth, 
though reason is the organ of the revelation. In 
trying to save the creeds we may make jettison 
of spiritual life. 

It is said truly that the revision of antiquated 
creeds, such as the Westminster Confession, is a 



EASTER 57 

desperate undertaking. Those who attempt it 
are trying to revise the sixteenth century. Surely 
the wiser course would be to let the old creeds 
remain as they are, for whatever they may still be 
worth; but to cease to impose them, or any 
human manifesto, as ordination tests. Let the 
engagement at ordination be one simply binding 
the minister to preach what in his conscience he 
believes to be the truth. An enlightened laity 
asks for no better credentials on the part of its 
teacher. 

The Sun speaks of the remarkable spread of 
ritualism, even in churches which are not sacer- 
dotal and do not pretend to apostolical succession. 
Ritualism has had two epochs and two phases. In 
England, when the advance of liberalism after the 
passing of the Reform act threatened to withdraw 
from the clergy the support of the State, they 
looked about for another support, and thought 
that they found it in a revival of the doctrines 
of Apostolical Succession and Real Presence. 
This is very distinctly avowed by Newman in 
the opening of the *^ Tracts for the Times." That 
movement, however, was ecclesiastical and theo- 
logical; the aesthetic element, though distinctly 



58 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

present, was not predominant ; on Newman him- 
self and his companions of the Oratory it had 
comparatively little hold. The present move- 
ment, which pervades not only the Anglican and 
mediaevalizing Church, but the churches gener- 
ally, owes its existence, not to theological specula- 
tion or to ecclesiastical policy, but to the growth 
of a vacuum in the region of religious belief, 
which music, art, flowers, and ceremony are re- 
quired to fill. That the beliefs and the religious 
system of the Middle Ages can be restored is an 
idea with which Ritualists, those of the Anglican 
Church at least, may play for a time, but it can 
hardly be seriously entertained. It is too likely 
that when the aesthetic enchantment has lost its 
power blank materialism will be the end. 

April, 1902. 



XII 

IS RELIGION WORTHLESS? 

" Verus " has said that no reHgion ever 
taught us anything worth knowing. What he 
said was true, if by "worth knowing" he means 
beneficial in a material sense. Yet it cannot be 
denied that religion has practically played a most 
important part in the development of humanity. 
Religious ordinance was the form originally 
assumed by social morality. A memorable 
instance of this is the religious legislation 
ascribed to Moses, especially the Decalogue. 
But the moral and social philosophy of Socrates 
and his disciples Plato and Xenophon certainly 
rested on religious belief; not in the Greek 
pantheon, but in a supreme power that made 
for righteousness. So did the moral philosophy 
of the great stoics Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, 
impersonal as their deity is. 

Egyptian morality appears to have been in 
form religious. More questionable, of course, 

59 



60 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

is the influence of the Greek pantheon, with its 
amorous Zeus and its sensual Olympus. Yet 
the Greek gods were upholders of justice. The 
Delphic Oracle in its best day seems to have been 
an organ of morality. We have the story of a man 
who, wishing to repudiate a deposit, consulted the 
Oracle and received an encouraging reply. When, 
having paid the penalty of his crime, he reproached 
the Oracle with having misled him, he was told 
that this was his reward for the insult which he 
had offered to the moral majesty of the god. 

In the aesthetic development of man religion has 
unquestionably played a great part. The Par- 
thenon and the cathedrals, the great painters, 
the composers of sacred music, are religious. 
So are Dante and Milton. So fundamentally is 
Shakespeare, though he was probably a free 
thinker. 

There have been aberrations very many and 
horrible, such as Moloch-worship and the Inqui- 
sition. But religion is not to be charged with 
the crimes of worldly powers which have enslaved 
it and abused its name. 

Christendom, whatever may become of its 
claims as a Revelation, retains its claims as a 



IS RELIGION WORTHLESS ? 6 1 

historical fact and an element in the progress of 
moral civilization. 

What is the origin of religion? The tendency 
appears to be almost universal, showing itself inde- 
pendently in every member of the human race, 
saving perhaps the very lowest savages. There 
must be some rational account of it, and it is 
difficult to see how that account could be found 
in evolution or in anything disclosed by physical 
science. Such an explanation of the origin of 
religion as the apparition of dead chieftains in 
dreams seems to be totally inadequate. Let us 
be thoroughly loyal to science and embrace all 
its real discoveries, however subversive of our 
traditions. But let us ask for recognition of all 
the phenomena of human nature, not only those 
which are demonstrably physical, but also those 
which appear to belong to another class. 

May not a man be doing what is at present 
premature in absolutely rejecting all religious 
belief and cutting himself off from the religious 
life of the world? May not the impetus of our 
parting from belief in the supernatural and the 
dogmatic carry us at first too far? 

August, 1903. 



XIII 

THE CRIMES OF CHRISTENDOM 

Commenting on an arraignment of the Christian 
churches, the Sun said the other day : — 

If our correspondent will follow the history of Chris- 
tianity in Europe from the time it first gathered strength 
to assert itself with physical force he will read a record of 
war, persecution, atrocity and fierce human passions in- 
flamed by religious enthusiasm which is not exceeded if it 
is equalled in its darkness in the history of any previous 
religious propaganda of which we have the record. 

Of the crimes committed in the name of Chris- 
tianity it is impossible to speak with too much 
sorrow and abhorrence. But the guilt, I submit, 
attaches not to Christianity itself, but to malig- 
nant influences under which it has fallen. The 
vital doctrines of Christianity as preached by its 
Founder are the fatherhood of God and the 
brotherhood of man. Our faith in these doc- 
trines may be failing; our faith in the brother- 
hood of man would certainly appear to be under- 
going eclipse. But there is nothing in them which 

62 



THE CRIMES OF CHRISTENDOM 63 

could possibly lend itself to atrocity or persecution. 
When the Inquisitor sought a warrant in the 
Gospel for his religious murders, he could find 
nothing more to his purpose than the words in 
the parable of the Great Feast, ^Xompel them 
[the guests] to come in," or St. Paul's saying, "I 
would that they were cut off which trouble you,'* 
which only the blindest bigotry could construe 
as a longing for an auto-da-fe. 

Islam propagated itself by the sword. Chris- 
tianity in its native character propagated itself 
by the Word preached by peaceful missionaries, 
who, taking their lives in their hands, converted 
the barbarians and founded the Christian nations. 

The Founder of Christianity said that His 
Kingdom was not of this world. Had that saying 
been kept, there could have been no persecutions. 
By keeping it in after days the Baptist Church 
has won a distinction unhappily almost unique. 
When the Empire, after struggling long to ex- 
tinguish Christianity, bowed to it and made it 
the imperial religion, it extended its political 
despotism over the Church. Orthodoxy, the 
doctrine patronized by the court, became law, 
heresy was treason; and there followed the 



64 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

inevitable results. Ecclesiastics denied their 
founder by appealing to the secular arm. Chris- 
tianity, however, humanized the Roman law, 
notably with regard to slavery. 

Special influence and authority could not fail 
to attach to the bishops of the two imperial cities, 
Rome and Constantinople ; especially to the 
Bishop of Rome, who was not overshadowed by 
the presence of the Emperor. In the dissolution 
of the Empire, the Roman See became a rallying 
point for the Western Church. But there was 
really no Pope in the present sense of the term, 
ho spiritual dictator claiming theocratic and 
universal authority over the Church, before 
Hildebrand. Gregory the Great denounced the 
title of universal Bishop as blasphemous. Hilde- 
brand it was who created the theocratic despot- 
ism, using such instruments as Norman conquest 
and German rebellion, as well as a clerical militia 
detached from humanity and bound to the Papacy 
by the enforcement of celibacy. There is not in 
history a greater mockery than the pretence 
of this autocrat and his successors, including 
Innocent III., Alexander VI., and Julius II., to 
represent the preacher of the Sermon on the 



THE CRIMES OF CHRISTENDOM 6$ 

Mount. Here we have the main source of per- 
secution and its atrocities; hence flowed the 
extermination of the Albigenses, the Inquisition, 
Alva's reign of blood in the Netherlands, the 
Massacre of St. Bartholomew, and the Dragon- 
ades. The Crusades, with any atrocities which 
they may have involved, were more the work of 
Christendom at large, but they can hardly be set 
down as persecution; they were rather a war 
for the defence of Christian civilization against 
the on-rolling tide of Mohammedan conquest, 
that irruption of moral barbarism, as it is now 
seen to be. Genuine Christianity v/as not left 
without witnesses. It showed itself in such 
characters as that of Anselm, in such writings as 
the "Imitatio Christi." 

Protestant Christianity could not at once get clear 
of the mediaeval tradition. But presently it did. 
It has repented of its crimes and renounced perse- 
cution. The Syllabus, which is the latest mani- 
festo of the theocratic Papacy, reaffirms the prin- 
ciple of intolerance, throwing down the gaunt- 
let to modern civilization and to the liberty of 
opinion which has been won by the struggle of 
ages for humanity. Infallibility cannot repent. 



66 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

The religious character would in any case, 
no doubt, have shown its weak side. There 
would have been extravagance, bigotry, con- 
troversial heat, and rancor; perhaps fanatical 
and sectarian affray; but without the influence of 
the Empire and the Theocracy there could hardly 
have been these enormous crimes. 

Catholicism, as its name imports, is univer- 
sal. Papalism is Italian. Only Italians, native 
or naturalized, can be Popes. The few his- 
torical exceptions are exceptions which prove 
the rule. Catholicism, with all its charac- 
teristics and graces, was fully developed before 
Hildebrand. There is nothing polemically 
Papal in the writings of Anselm, Thomas a 
Kempis, or Pascal. Lacordaire and Montalem- 
bert were thoroughly Catholic, but as friends of 
liberty, thinking that it could be reconciled with 
Catholicism, they were disavowed by the Papacy. 
By Acton, who died Catholic, the Papacy is 
sternly arraigned. 

I plead once more for fair consideration of all 
real phenomena, physical or moral. Christianity, 
apart from its entanglements with imperial des- 
potisms and theocratic usurpation, seems, by the 



THE CRIMES OF CHRISTENDOM 67 

principles which it has propagated and the char- 
acters which it has produced, to have been up to 
the present time a great power, to say the least, 
of moral progress, and one which is not easily 
explained by physical evolution. 

October, 1902. 



XIV 

DOES CHRISTIANITY FALL WITH DOGMA? 

It seems to be assumed in some quarters that 
if ecclesiastical dogma departs, nothing of Chris- 
tianity will be left us. The edifice of ecclesias- 
tical dogma is built on belief in the Incarnation 
and Atonement, which again depends on belief 
in the Fall of Man. Science has apparently dis- 
proved the Fall of Man, and proved that man, 
instead of falling, rose, by evolution, from lower 
organizations. The inference seems irresistible 
and fatal to dogmatic Christianity. But does 
this reduce Christianity to an ethical speculation, 
one of a number of the same kind? 

The essence of Christianity as it came from the 
lips of the Author seems to be belief in the father- 
hood of God and the brotherhood of man. Trace 
the practical effect of this belief through the cen- 
turies, disengaging it as well as you can from 
ecclesiastical superfetations, from the effects of 
fellowship with evil powers of the world, from 

68 



DOES CHRISTIANITY FALL WITH DOGMA ? 69 

the crimes of theocracy, and from the fanaticism 
of sects. Does it not appear wherever it has 
prevailed, under whatever form and in whatever 
circumstances, in all nations and in all states of 
life, to have produced in those who strove to live 
up to its excellence and beneficence of character, 
spiritual happiness, with an inward assurance 
that it would be well for them in the end? In 
that case may not Christianity fairly present itself 
as something more than an ethical speculation? 
May it not claim to rank in some degree as a right 
solution of the problem of humanity and a prac- 
tical experiment which has not failed? 

It is said that in the struggle of righteous- 
ness and mercy against might, those who have 
borne themselves best upon the side of that which 
Christians claim as Christian principle, have in 
many cases not been Christians. This is true, 
as it is true also that some Christian churches 
have taken that which seems to be ethically the 
anti-Christian side. But have these men, in 
discarding Christian profession, discarded belief 
in that which is the essence of Christianity ? Have 
they renounced belief in the brotherhood of man ? 
May it not be said that Comte's Great Being of 



70 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

Humanity is Christ's brotherhood of man under 
another name? Belief in God may have been 
renounced, yet to warrant behef in a brother- 
hood of man there must surely be some paternal 
and consecrating power. 

To demonstrate that Christianity cannot stand 
as a philosophy of the conduct of life without 
the support of dogma, are cited extreme pas- 
sages in the Gospel against carefulness for riches 
and the things of this world, with the remark 
that "so far from there being practical unanimity 
in accepting this philosophy of the conduct of 
life, there is practically unanimity in repudiating 
it." Beyond doubt the passages are in expression 
hyperbolical. They are the language, as those 
who have rejected supernaturalism believe, of 
a carpenter's son who spoke to the heart rather 
than to the philosophic mind, who had been bred 
in no school of philosophy and was untrained to 
the strict use of language. Beyond doubt their 
hyperbolical form has told against their prac- 
tical effect. But, after all, the gist of them is 
"keep your heart above wealth and devotion to 
its increase." Has not this been practised, with- 
out detriment to industry, by men even in the 



DOES CHRISTIANITY FALL WITH DOGMA? 71 

mart or on the Stock Exchange, and have they 
not found that self -approval and moral happiness 
were the result? 

It was rather surprising to hear a doubt ex- 
pressed, as it was the other day, by a scientific 
man as to the effect of the progress of science 
on human happiness. As to the effect of scien- 
tific discovery on our material well-being and 
everything that directly depends on it there can 
be no doubt whatever, though querulous old age 
may sometimes be found looking back wistfully 
to the restfulness of the days before the electric 
telegraph, the ocean greyhound, and the automo- 
bile. Nor, if it is the effect of scientific discovery 
on our religious faith that is meant, can there be 
any doubt that knowledge of our nature and 
destiny, however unwelcome and lowering in 
itself, is better than ignorance and infinitely 
better than falsehood. Let science prove that 
man is merely a physical development of the 
ape or earthworm, and that with his present 
life all ends; we will accept the proof, though 
there may be little comfort in the materialist's 
exhortation to make the best of this life and look 
forward with complacency to our eternal sleep, 



72 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

the life perhaps being that of a galley-slave, 
while eternal sleep is a pleasant name for anni- 
hilation. But the conviction cannot be said to 
enhance the dignity or conduce to the happiness 
of man; apparently it will hardly conduce to 
morality, personal or social. Before accepting 
it we once more crave a full examination of all 
real phenomena. Physical science itself is still 
advancing, and there may be Darwins after 
Darwin. 

January, 1904. 



XV 

SABATIER ON RELIGIONS OF AUTHORITY 

Momentous is this crisis in the history of 
man if all authoritative religion, all consecrated 
tradition, fails him, and he is left to work out by 
his own reason the problem of his origin, state, 
and destiny. With the religions of authority 
would pass away the whole order of spiritual 
guides, leaving, as the departure of the clergy 
certainly would, an incalculable void, not only 
in our theological, but in our moral and social 
system. To such a crisis, however, according 
to M. Sabatier's work on ^^Religions of Author- 
ity," we have come. 

The days of all the religions of authority, 
in M. Sabatier's opinion, are numbered. He 
appears to think that the Papacy is likely to last 
the longest. It has a wonderfully strong organi- 
zation, an imposing and fascinating ritual, a 
legendary antiquity founded on a mythical list 
of early Popes. It still commands the allegiance 

73 



74 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

of masses like the Italian peasantry, who can 
believe in the miracle of St. Januarius and the 
Holy House of Loretto, or the crowds of pilgrims 
to Lourdes. Of highly educated adherents it 
retains comparatively few, of scientific adherents 
almost none. It offers in these times of religious 
confusion and perplexity a tempting haven to 
the weak and doubting mind. It has in its own 
despite gained in spiritual character and re- 
spectability by severance from the temporal 
power. As an anti- revolutionary influence it is 
rather regarded with complacency by the conser- 
vative statesmen of Europe. Guizot seemed to 
have this feeling about it. But now, loaded 
with its burden of historical memories, it is 
going into its last struggle against reason and 
progress. In its Syllabus it bids defiance to liberty 
of conscience and of opinion, to the right of the 
State, to the cardinal principles of modern civili- 
zation. Civilization takes up the glove. 

That the Papacy is not the whole of the Catho- 
lic Church we have a reminder in another religion 
of authority, with which M. Sabatier does not deal. 
The Eastern Church, now mainly represented 
by the State Church of Russia, has all along 



SABATIER ON RELIGIONS OF AUTHORITY 75 

remained separate from that which is represented 
by the Papacy, in spite of an enforced, transitory, 
and nugatory act of submission. In this case the 
authority is largely national, the union of Church 
and State in Russia being complete, so that the 
Procurator of the Holy Synod is a very important 
Minister of State. The Church is Holy Russia, 
and Holy Russia is the Church. The immobility 
of the system verges on torpor. Naturally those 
who break away from it break away with a ven- 
geance. The orthodoxy of Pobyedonostseff gives 
birth to heterodoxy in Tolstoi. Here also the 
incipient forces of dissolution may be seen. 

Yet another religion of authority unnoticed by 
M. Sabatier is Anglicanism, the religion of the 
State Church of England. A State Church that 
of England is, in the fullest sense of the term. 
Its doctrines and ritual are an amalgam of the 
personal bias of Henry VIII., who died half a 
Catholic though in revolt against the Papacy, 
with the policy of his executors, a new aristoc- 
racy looking for support to the party of progress 
against the ancient nobility, and with the 
policy of the opportunist statesmen of Elizabeth, 
one of theological compromise. In the history 



^6 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

of the Church of England the several elements 
of its composition predominate in turn: first the 
Genevan, which gives birth to the Lambeth 
Articles and the delegation to the Calvinistic 
Synod of Dort; then, under Laud, the Catholic; 
again, after a long period almost of torpor, the 
Evangelical; and now once more, in a large 
section of the clergy, the Catholic, though a small 
section is rationalist. The authority in this case 
is the Parliament, which originally settled the 
system without any real regard to Convocation, 
but in those times was itself Anglican, whereas 
it is now made up of men of all religions and of 
none. Such a state of things, if the Church of 
England is a spiritual body, cannot last long. 
She may be forced to break her political bonds, 
and dogmatic dissolution could hardly fail to 
ensue. 

Practically the most important of the subjects 
with which M. Sabatier deals is the Protestant 
authority, that of the Bible. He seems fully to 
embrace the judgments of criticism, literary and 
historical : — 

"In what condition do we actually find the text of the 
Old Testament Scriptures ? Instead of the homogeneity 



SABATIER ON RELIGIONS OF AUTHORITY 77 

formerly attributed to them, we find in the historic books 
a fabric woven of documents yet more ancient, whose vari- 
colored threads are easily distinguishable, making clear 
that the Pentateuch and the books of Joshua, Judges, 
Samuel, and Kings assumed their present form at a very 
late date. Furthermore, what a medley of disarrange- 
ment do we find in the prophecies of Isaiah, Zechariah, 
and Jeremiah, to speak only of those whose want of con- 
nection is visible to the unaided eye ! What is the book 
of Psalms, if not the Psalter of the Jewish synagogue, 
made up of hymns of very different periods, already gath- 
ered into earher collections? What shall we say under 
this head of Proverbs and the entire Solomonic literature, 
offshoots of which are found down to the second century 
before our era?" (p. 236.) 

M. Sabatier abandons in plain terms the super- 
natural notion of the Bible and confesses that it 
is no longer the infallible rule of religious thought, 
the oracle of absolute and eternal truth. Yet 
he treats it still as the great aliment and support 
of spiritual life. He says that it ^^ continues 
to discharge a double and essential function in 
the life of churches, families, and individuals; 
that it is no longer a code, but remains a testimony ; 
is no longer a law, but is a means of grace ; does 
not prescribe the scientific formulas of faith, 
.but does remain the historic fountain of Christian 



78 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

knowledge." Luther, he says, and Calvin, used 
the Bible freely as spiritual food without bibli- 
olatry ; Luther disparaging the Epistle of James, 
Calvin looking askance on the Apocalypse. To 
which it might be replied, in the first place, 
that Luther and Calvin brought with them con- 
firmed convictions from their previous religious 
state; in the second place, that they were not 
common men. Simple souls can hardly be ex- 
pected to make use of a great course of literature 
as food for spiritual appetite developed within 
themselves, injecting into it their personal thoughts 
and emotion. They crave for authority, or at 
least a positive rule such as they thought they 
had in the Bible, believing it to be throughout the 
inspired Word of God. 

How, after the admissions which M. Sabatier 
has made, can he continue to speak of '^the Bible" 
at all? How can he persevere in treating as a 
book that which is in fact a collection of books, 
independent of each other, and varying greatly 
in character, spirit, and value? The Old Testa- 
ment is the whole of ancient Hebrew literature 
bound up together. The idea of God differs 
materially in different parts of it. The God of 



SABATIER ON RELIGIONS OF AUTHORITY 79 

Genesis is anthropomorphic, and the special deity 
of a patriarchal family. The God of Exodus, 
Joshua, and Judges is intensely tribal, sanctioning 
in the interest of the tribe wholesale massacre, 
as in the case of the Canaanites; treason, as in 
the case of Rahab ; assassination, as in the case of 
Sisera; inflicting plagues upon all the Egyptians 
to make Pharaoh let the favored tribe go. This 
deity and the deity who makes Balaam's ass 
speak, who sends a lying spirit to Ahab, who 
makes bears kill a party of boys for mocking 
Elisha, is a conception surely lower than that 
of Deity in the second Isaiah, in Amos, in the 
more spiritual Psalms. The Psalms are mani- 
festly by different hands. The spirit of some 
of them is gentle and beautiful. That of others 
is the reverse. 

An attempt has been made to impart unity to 
the collection and at the same time to explain 
away its moral difficulties and give it as a whole 
the character of a progressive revelation by the 
help of that universal key, the principle of evolu- 
tion. But no process of evolution can really be 
discerned. In the latest books of the series, 
those of Ezra and Nehemiah, there reigns the 



8o IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

narrowest tribalism, a tribalism which commands 
the Hebrew to put away his Gentile wife. Of 
the book of Esther it is only necessary to say that 
it is the source of the feast of Purim. 

If the Hebrew literature is divested of the 
character of revelation, is it so immeasur- 
ably higher, morally and spiritually, than the 
Greek? The Greek pantheon, of course, is 
morally low, though sunny and inspiring to art. 
But the deity of Socrates, though indistinct and 
hardly personal, is sublimely moral. In the 
Hebrew literature there is, on the whole, not 
much of tenderness or affection. We have Ruth, 
it is true, we have the friendship of David and 
Jonathan, and some other touches of humanity. 
But there is no parting of Hector and Andromache. 
There is no Antigone or Alcestis. There is nothing 
like the sentiment of the Greek epitaph in which 
the dead wife says that of the two babes which 
she bore her husband, one she keeps with her as 
the pledge of his love, and the other she has left 
to be the prop of his old age. Sternness, amount- 
ing often to grimness, seems to be the general tone 
of the Old Testament. 

Then, upon what principle would M. Sabatier 



SABATIER ON RELIGIONS OF AUTHORITY 8 1 

say, if belief in a supernatural revelation is to be 
discarded, are we to bind up the New Testament 
with the Old? The Deity and the religion of 
the Old Testament are tribal, and tribal they re- 
main to the last. The God of the Chosen People 
might be destined to extend his sway over all the 
nations of the earth; but he would still be the 
God of the Chosen People. The God of the New 
Testament is the equal Father of all. The son 
of the carpenter at Nazareth would, of course, 
accept uncritically the sacred books of his nation 
with their traditional interpretations. But it 
was not from the narrative of the plagues of Egypt 
or of the slaughter of the Canaanites that he 
drew his ideas of the fatherhood of God and the 
brotherhood of man. If the religion of the New 
Testament owed its birth to that of the Old 
Testament, it was by repulsion as well as by pro- 
duction. Of the prophecies of Jesus in the Old 
Testament, criticism has entirely disposed. The 
bigots of the Old Testament crucified the Teacher 
of the New. Nothing is more dear or familiar 
to us than the Bible as it is. Great indeed would 
be the wrench of parting with it. Yet nothing 
surely can be less rational than a volume in which 



82 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

certain portions of Hebrew history and literature 
are bound up as identical in source and spirit 
with the Sermon on the Mount. 

For my own part, I should prefer to rest the 
claims of Christianity to serious and unimpassioned 
consideration no more on anything mystical or 
esoteric than on anything supernatural, but rather 
on the evidence of the character, moral and social, 
which Christianity has produced, and the relation 
of that character to the progress of humanity. 
These are facts not less certain in their way 
than any that can be submitted to the investiga- 
tion of science. 

March, 1904. 



XVI 

THE TENDENCIES OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 

Since Sabatier's work foreshadowing the de- 
cline of religious authority was noticed in the 
SuUj a movement has been on foot in Canada 
tending in the direction which it was then suggested 
that religious progress would be likely to take. 
It had its origin in Toronto, but its most congenial 
scene appears to be our Canadian Northwest, 
where everything is] new, a population, being 
immigrant, is less bound by old ties, secular or 
religious, and the futility of dogmatic division 
is most apparent; where, moreover, the incon- 
venience of maintaining three churches for one 
congregation must be specially felt. It is proposed, 
and the proposal seems strongly supported, to 
unite the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Congrega- 
tional churches. The union is not to be one merely 
of pulpits and good works, but organic. As 
between the Methodists and Congregationalists, 
there would be little to sacrifice on either side 

^3 



84 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

in the way of doctrine; there would be more 
between the Presbyterians and the other two 
classes, unless the Presbyterians have radically 
modified the Westminster Confession. The Con- 
gregationalists would have to sacrifice their theory 
of church government. Fusion of organizations, 
with their vested interests, might be more difficult 
than the fusion of doctrines. Perhaps the fusion 
of names might be most difficult of all. A fear 
has suggested itself that the result, instead of being 
an advance in liberalism, might be a consolidation 
of dogma on a large scale. But this seems unlikely. 
Sectarian bulwarks having once given way, the 
result probably would be an approach to a church 
of ethical, spiritual, and social brotherhood on 
Christian lines such as the Protestant churches 
are apparently tending to be. 

I was sure to receive proofs of the impatience 
with which thorough-going materialists, elated 
by the grand discovery of evolution, regard those 
who hesitate to embrace at once the full mate- 
rialist creed and say with its chief living exposi- 
tor that the three great obstacles to our well- 
being are the beliefs in God, Free Will, and a 
Future Life. For my part, I have unfeignedly 



THE TENDENCIES OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 85 

professed my loyalty to Science. I heartily accept 
evolution, only pausing to see whether a discovery 
so recent as well as momentous has yet found its 
final level. I only ask that certain phenomena 
of human nature, its liberty of choice in action, 
its moral aspirations, its power of idealization, its 
finer affections, its sense of spiritual beauty, its 
conception of the fatherhood of God and the 
brotherhood of man, all in fact that constitutes 
what we have regarded as spiritual life, should 
receive fair consideration, and that we should be 
told whether these phenomena can be explained 
by evolution or by any process of material de- 
velopment. I hesitate also to admit the assump- 
tion that the evidence of our five senses, even 
with all our scientific aids, is a complete account 
of the universe, so as to shut out any indication 
that there may be in our nature of something be- 
yond. Truth, welcome or unwelcome, we must 
embrace. In embracing it is our only salvation. 
But it is too much to say that proof of the mate- 
rialist theory would be welcome. The theory 
means annihilation after a life as transitory as 
that of an insect; less jocund, it is to be feared, 
than that of an insect in the case of a very large 



S6 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

proportion of our race. Positivism seeks to con- 
sole us with an attractive formulary setting forth 
the cooperation of successive generations in the 
furtherance of human progress. What interest 
can any generation have in a progress of which 
it will not personally partake or even be conscious ? 
Besides, in what is the progress to end? Science 
says, in a physical catastrophe. 

Not less fully do I accept the judgments of 
criticism on the authenticity of the Gospel narra- 
tives and the mythical element which they unques- 
tionably contain. With the supernatural and 
miraculous, with what has hitherto been called 
revelation, we must evidently part. But the 
Character which has formed the Christian Ideal 
still remains. It is not only pictured in the Gos- 
pels, but reflected in the genuine writings of Paul. 
There remains also the doctrine to which Paul 
was a convert and which was preached with signal 
success by him. There remains the effect of 
that doctrine on the history of the civilized world. 
Loaded and sullied though Christianity has been 
by alliances with secular powers, theocratic usurpa- 
tion, dogmatic bigotry, and sectarian strife, what 
moral influence can be traced in the progress 



THE TENDENCIES OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 8y 

of humanity comparable to that of the behef 
in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood 
of man? There is surely nothing superstitious 
or reactionary in the recognition of experience 
embodied in the great facts of history. 

April, 1904. 



XVII 

THE bible: its critics and its defenders 

We learn from the Sun that orthodoxy under 
the very eminent leadership of Dr. Patton is 
confronting heterodoxy on a decisive field in 
defence of the "full inspiration and supreme 
authority of the Bible as the word of God.'' It 
will be a momentous encounter. What are all 
our political questions compared with the question 
whether we have or have not the divinely inspired 
word of life? 

Those whose opinions I share will be inclined 
to demur to the use in a critical discussion of 
the term "Bible," dear and familiar as that term 
may be. The founder of Christianity, a humble 
Galilean, naturally received with uncritical sim- 
plicity the sacred books and traditions of his 
nation. He accepted as historical the story of 
Jonah, and saw in the appellation of Jehovah as 
the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob a proof 
that those patriarchs still lived. But Pharisaism 

88 



THE BIBLE : ITS CRITICS AND ITS DEFENDERS 89 

obeyed its instincts in crucifying the Founder 
of Christianity. The Anglican Articles say ''the 
Old Testament is not contrary to the New." 
In some parts it is anticipative ; but what can be 
more contrary to the brotherhood of man than 
the order to smite the Canaanites and utterly 
destroy them? What can be more contrary to 
the Christian rule of marriage than is the in- 
junction of Ezra to the Jews to put away their 
Gentile wives? The God of the Old Testament 
to the last is tribal, though he is supreme over 
the gods of all the other nations and will some 
day make his tribe and worship supreme. The 
God of the New Testament is universal. 

It is time that we should frankly treat as primi- 
tive the Old Testament stories of the Creation 
and the Deluge, which distinctly clash with the 
true revelation of science. They ought no longer 
to be taught to children. I recollect the ignomini- 
ous struggles of a great geologist, whose lectures 
I attended in my youth, to reconcile scientific fact 
with established and consecrated belief. 

The Old Testament has its sublimities, its 
beauties, its passages of advanced morality, both 
personal and social. In virtue of these it must 



90 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

always hold its ground. The Mosaic law, 
whatever may be the date of its redaction, 
belongs in its character to a primitive era, and 
for that era is a notable advance in civiliza- 
tion. Recognizing primitive customs, it improves 
on them. It distinguishes wilful murder from 
accidental homicide, and confines to wilful mur- 
der the function of the avenger of blood. It 
forbids the taking of money as a satisfaction for 
blood, which was the general custom of primitive 
mankind. It condemns the hereditary blood 
feud. By providing judges and calling on the 
congregation to judge between the slayer and 
the avenger of blood, it puts private revenge under 
the control of public law. It limits the evil 
privilege of asylum. It limits paternal despotism, 
which among the Romans was unlimited, requir- 
ing a public process and the concurrence of the 
mother in the execution of the rebellious child. 
Recognizing polygamy, as in those days was 
inevitable, it guards against the evil jealousies 
and partialities of the harem. It even mitigates 
in some measure the barbarous laws of war, re- 
quiring that a garrison shall be regularly summoned, 
and forbidding the cutting down of the fruit trees. 



THE BIBLE: ITS CRITICS AND ITS DEFENDERS 91 

the permanent wealth of the country, which was 
regularly practised by the Greeks. It extends 
a measure of protection to the feelings of captive 
women. It is singularly free from militarism, 
making no provision for a standing army, even 
foregoing forced service in war, and treating 
*^ peace in all your borders" as the highest bless- 
ing. It recognizes slavery, then universal, but 
mercifully interposes to some extent between the 
master and the slave. It however betrays its 
human origin in ordaining death for witchcraft. 
Nor can mere improvements on the tribal system, 
though remarkable and even wonderful, be said 
clearly to bespeak the intervention of God. 

The Decalogue is very high morality for its 
day, as the continuance of its authority has proved, 
though its allusion to the Creation shows that it 
was not inspired by the Maker of the world. 
The Sabbath, while in its Jewish form it belongs 
to the past, has glided with rational modification 
into our inestimable Day of Rest. 

If the grandeurs and beauties of the Old Testa- 
ment are apparent, its weaknesses cannot well 
be concealed. Who can pretend to admire all 
the ecstatic utterances of Jeremiah and Ezekiel ? 



92 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

The book of Job has been lauded beyond measure. 
It has striking passages, and its theme is one of 
the deepest interest. But it signally fails to solve 
its problem, the compatibility of the sufferings of 
good men with the providence of God. Socrates, 
as reflected in Plato, is here clearly above Job. 

Some passages in the Old Testament which 
are instinct with tribal cruelty and pander to the 
war spirit have borne very bitter fruit. A plea 
has been entered for the retention of these as 
congenial to a particular class of converts. It 
was for that very reason that Ulfilas, the apostle 
of the Goths, left the book of Kings out of his 
translation of the Scriptures. 

Inspiration must be universal or none. We 
are not warranted in picking out certain passages 
and pronouncing them divine while the rest are 
human. A single error or immorality is fatal 
to the divine origin of the whole. That a divine 
Being should err or mislead is inconceivable. 
Not less inconceivable is it that he should have 
subjected himself in his operations to such a 
law as evolution, and then waited for Darwin to 
explain the dispensation to mankind. 

Inspiration has not been defined, nor does it 



THE BIBLE : ITS CRITICS AND ITS DEFENDERS 93 

seem that any distinct idea has ever been formed 
of the process. How was the divine mind com- 
municated to the writer? By what signs or con- 
sciousness was the writer assured that he had 
become the penman of the Almighty and was 
authorized in that character to claim the trust and 
obedience of the world? 

It seems to follow that the Old Testament 
ought not to be bound up with the New as the 
record of a continuous revelation, hard as it will 
be to dissolve the union between the two parts 
of our family Bible. 

The value of the New Testament, to a rational- 
ist, does not depend on the proof of apostolic or 
contemporary authorship, on the credibility of the 
miraculous parts of the narrative, or on anything 
that the higher criticism has swept or is sweeping 
away. It rests on the Character unmistakably 
portrayed, and on the doctrines which unques- 
tionably gave birth to Christendom. 

May, 1904, 



XVIII 

IS CHRISTIANITY DEAD OR DYING ? 

When it is said that Christianity since the 
middle of the eighteenth century has been dead 
or dying, we must ask what is meant by Chris- 
tianity. If what is meant is beHef in the super- 
natural inspiration of the Bible, in miracles, in 
the creeds, Christianity unquestionably is dead 
or dying in critical minds. The miracles, we see, 
were a halo which gathered round the head of 
the Founder, superior to other such halos in that 
they are miracles of mercy, not of power. But 
the doctrine which is the vital essence of Chris- 
tianity, belief in the fatherhood of God and the 
brotherhood of man, seems not yet to be dead 
or certainly dying. 

During the first half of the eighteenth century 
spiritual life was at a low ebb, the main cause be- 
ing the tyranny or torpor of established Churches. 
That was the day of Voltaire. But towards the 
end of the century there was a great revival. In 

94 



IS CHRISTIANITY DEAD OR DYING? 95 

England there was outside the Establishment 
the Methodist movement under Wesley; inside 
the Establishment there was the evangelical 
movement, which had Christians of eminence at 
its head. From the religious zeal thus awakened, 
besides a moral and social reform, sprang great 
religious enterprises, missionary and philanthropic. 
The movement for the abolition of slavery and 
those for the redemption of suffering classes in 
England were Christian in spirit and were led by 
Lord Shaftesbury and other religious men. 

The Reformation itself was a revival, and a 
revival not only from torpor and seeming death, 
but from depravation apparently the most fatal, 
from the Papacy of the Borgias and the reign of 
the Inquisition. Has polytheism, Buddhism, or 
Islam ever shown its inherent vitality by a similar 
revival ? 

The preaching of the Founder of Christendom, 
who taught the fatherhood of God and the brother- 
hood of man, undeniably was the great awakening 
of spiritual life in the world. A world without 
spiritual life, or religion as the embodiment of 
that life, and regulated by social science solely 
in temporal interests, is perfectly conceivable. 



96 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

But the religion which should take the place of 
vital Christianity is not. Renan says of the 
words addressed to the woman of Samaria that 
they are the essence of religion, and that if there 
are intelligent beings in other planets and they are 
religious, this and none other their religion must be. 

The revelations of the physical world come to 
us through the action of high scientific intellects. 
Was it not possible that a revelation of the moral 
world should come to us through a character of 
unique excellence, benevolence, and beauty, pre- 
served in its simplicity and purity by the pastoral 
isolation of Galilee? 

The Positivist points triumphantly to the self- 
devotion of the Japanese sacrificing themselves 
for their country though they have, as he assumes, 
no religion. Is the diagnosis quite correct? 
When the Japanese rips himself up rather than 
surrender, what is his motive? Is it self-sacrifice 
like that of the Christian martyr, or an intense 
manifestation of the tribal instinct which passes 
from the animal to the human herd? In self- 
sacrifice for the good of humanity such as that 
of the Christian martyr there would seem to be 
an element of another kind. 



IS CHRISTIANITY DEAD OR DYING? 97 

An article published in the North American 
Review on ^^The Immortality of the SouP' has, 
it seems, saddened some of its readers. The 
admissions made in it saddened its writer. 
But it would sadden him and all of us still more 
to rest in untruth. He has shown that he so far 
refuses to believe that all ends here. 

July, 1904. 



XIX 

THE TWO THEORIES OF LIFE 

"You need not expect that people will stand 
aside because you have come. They are going 
to crowd you, and you will have to crowd them. 
They will leave you behind unless you leave 
them behind." Such, it seems, is the view of 
human society and life which can now be pre- 
sented by educational authority. A generation 
ago this doctrine would have startled us. 
But we seem verging on an age of survival of 
the fittest, fitness being measured by force; of 
progress by destruction, of imperialism, of strenu- 
ous life. Against the prevailing tendencies vital 
Christianity, the belief in the fatherhood of God 
and the brotherhood of man, continues to strug- 
gle, though with a force impaired by its entangle- 
ment with beliefs which science and criticism 
have disproved, but which it is hard for an or- 
dained clergy and ecclesiastical organizations to 

cast off. The world is again divided between 

98 



THE TWO THEORIES OF LIFE 99 

these tendencies and the parties to which they 
give birth, somewhat in the same way as at the 
time of the Reformation it was divided between 
Catholicism and Protestantism, when the lines of 
nationality were crossed and superseded by those 
of religious belief. Not that orthodox and titular 
Christianity by any means coincides with faith 
in human brotherhood and righteousness. Some 
churches have floated with the political tide. 
But of the essence of Christianity, as it is embodied 
in the Sermon on the Mount, not a little is now 
to be found outside the churches. 

Christian ethic has suffered by a belief in the 
inspiration of the Gospels which has led to the 
acceptance of Oriental hyperbole as literal pre- 
cept. The injunctions of forgiveness of injuries, 
taken literally, would be fatuous. But plac- 
ability is not fatuous, or undignified. In a fa- 
mous passage of Corneille's "Cinna," Augustus, 
after overwhelming the offender with a rehearsal 
of his misdeeds, changes his tone and says, "Let 
us be friends." Is Augustus lowered? Is there 
more dignity in the opposite sentiment, so frankly 
avowed in the columns of the Sun by a repre- 
sentative of the old Dispensation ? 



100 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

The Christian doctrine of fraternity is, at all 
events for many of us, more comfortable than 
that of mutual jostling and the survival of the 
strongest. We cannot all be foremost in the race 
of competition, we cannot all thrust each other 
aside, we cannot all climb over each other's 
heads. But we can all do our duty in our place ; 
and if duty is the pledge of happiness, we can all 
in a measure be happy. 

Is competition or cooperation the fundamental 
law of humanity? Take any product of human 
industry, a manufactured article, for instance; 
trace it back in thought to the multifarious agencies 
which in countries and ages widely apart have 
contributed to its production, and say whether it 
does not speak of a relation very different from 
that of herds of animals jostling each other. 
What is the mainspring of progress but cooper- 
ation ? 

Nobody could be more free from orthodox 
superstition of any kind than Carlyle, who in one 
of his Essays, after speaking of other agencies of 
progress, says : — 

Or, to take an infinitely higher instance, that of the 
Christian reUgion, which, under every theory of it, in the 



THE TWO THEORIES OF LIFE lOI 

believing or unbelieving mind, must ever be regarded as 
the crowning glory, or rather the life and soul, of our whole 
modern culture: How did Christianity arise and spread 
abroad among men? Was it by institutions, and establish- 
ments and well-arranged systems of mechanism? Not so; 
on the contrary, in all past and existing institutions for 
those ends its divine spirit has invariably been found to 
languish and decay. It arose in the mystic deeps of man's 
soul; and was spread abroad by the "preaching of the 
word," by simple, altogether natural and individual efforts; 
and flew, like hallowed fire, from heart to heart, till all 
were purified and illuminated by it ; and its heavenly light 
shone, as it still shines, and (as sun or star) will ever shine, 
through the whole dark destinies of man. 

It happened that when I laid down Carlyle 
there met my eyes a gilt cross on the spire of 
a Catholic church illumined by the sun. The 
cross was the emblem of all that was materially 
weakest, of slavery and the shameful death of the 
slave. The eagle was the emblem of the Roman 
Empire, the greatest embodiment of force which 
the world has ever seen. The eagle and the 
cross encountered each other. Which prevailed? 
It may be said, of course, that the cross repre- 
sented a force. It did, but the force was not that 
of strenuous life and the big stick. 



102 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

Once more I have not pretended, nor do I 
pretend, to advance any theory of the universe 
or of man. I only ask that before we embrace 
ultra-materiaHsm, with its apparent corollaries, 
moral and social, all the real phenomena of 
humanity, not only those with which physical 
science deals and which Darwin's grand discovery 
covers, shall receive fair consideration, and among 
the rest the phenomena of history. 

August, 1904. 



XX 

TELEPATHY 

There appeared the other day in the London 
Times an account by Mr. Rider Haggard of a 
telepathic communication between him and his 
favorite dog which he evidently considered of 
great importance. It seems he had a nightmare 
in which he dreamed that his dog was being 
killed and cried to him for help. It turned out 
that the dog had been killed about that hour. It 
does not seem that the coincidence of time was 
exact, while as to the manner of the dog's death 
the dream gave no sign, or none that could be 
deemed a coincidence. The narrative, I confess, 
seemed to me less important as a proof of mys- 
terious agency than as a proof of the extent to 
which fancy can operate on very slight materials, 
even in a strong mind. Mr. Haggard designates 
his dream as a nightmare; the cause of night- 
mare is indigestion; and it is difficult to believe 
that indigestion is a factor in the operations of the 
spirit world. 

103 



104 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

All the cases of telepathy of which I have read 
have seemed to me to resolve themselves either 
into fulfilments of natural expectations, as in the 
case of warnings that a person known to be sick 
is dead, or into accidental coincidences, of which 
in the chapter of accidents there are sure to be 
many, some of them curious and striking; the 
occurrence being afterwards dressed up by the 
retroactive imagination of which we are all apt to 
be the unconscious dupes. It has been remarked 
that there has often been a letter in the case and 
that the letters have not been produced. 

I may mention an instance of accidental coinci- 
dence which fell within my own knowledge. A 
person living at Oxford was staying in a house 
at some distance from that city. Crossing a 
heath, he was attacked by faintness and lay for 
some time prostrate on the heath. When he got 
back to the house in which he was staying he 
found that at the very moment when he was lying 
on the heath a telegram had been received from 
his servant at Oxford asking whether it was true 
that he had died suddenly. Another person of 
the same name had died suddenly. This was the 
explanation. Had the fainting fit ended differ- 



TELEPATHY 



105 



ently, here would have been a telepathic warn- 
ing, and if not with a letter, with a telegram as 
its proof. 

As to spiritualism, one can only wonder that 
the imposture should have survived such a series 
of exposures. It in fact exposes itself, since the 
spirits must materialize before we can be made 
sensible of their presence. The planchette has 
produced nothing but absurdities. Such a mode 
of communication adopted by spirits is in itself 
absurd. The delusion is probably kept alive by 
the craving for intercourse with the lost objects 
of affection. The premier medium of the day, 
illumined by a spirit which had entered him, 
recounted to me the misfortunes of my nephew, 
when a nephew I never had. In this case I 
rather suspected that the spirit was trading on 
a hint given by a friend who was himself mis- 
informed. When I asked whether I was married, 
the answer was that I seemed to be alone in the 
material world and yet not alone. 

It is needless to say that there has always been 
a craving for the supernatural, which has shown 
itself in the eclipses of religion. With the collapse 
of Roman religion came the mysteries of Isis; 



I06 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

with the collapse of mediaeval Catholicism came 
the prevalence of astrology, which captured 
minds so powerful in different ways as those of 
Wallenstein and Kepler. Such fancies as spiritual- 
ism, telepathy, planchette, seem to be the offspring 
of a similar void in the soul, created by the depar- 
ture of traditional religion. They will not help us 
to save or revive our spiritual life. They will act 
in the opposite way. They will seduce us into 
grovelling superstition. There are mental mys- 
teries, no doubt, still to be solved by physiology. 
The creative action of the imagination in dreams 
is one of them. So is the general mystery, still 
profound, of memory. But there is no place 
for the supernatural. Let us put that away for- 
ever. 

August, 1904, 



XXI 

SPIRITUAL versus SUPERNATURAL 

I FIND that an expression used by me has 
been misconstrued. Referring to telepathy and 
other miracles, I said that there was no place for 
the supernatural. I did not mean to say that there 
was no place for the spiritual. Spiritual life, with 
its intimations, presents itself to me, not as super- 
natural, but as the natural though the highest 
development of humanity. 

Another word on the subject of that paper. 

Some of us remember that the original form of 

these pretended manifestations was table-turning. 

Table-turning for a time was the rage. In the 

circle of my own acquaintance there was a man 

of considerable intellect and attainments who 

was carried away by this absurdity. I took part 

in an experiment, and plainly saw one of the party, 

unconsciously of course, pressing the table and 

making it turn. 

"M. M." is apparently inclined to believe in 
107 



I08 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

spiritualism because a female medium guessed 
his malady and the names of two of his relatives. 
Could inspiration do no better than this? These 
pretenders are of course adepts in the trade. They 
know how to fish out information and how to feel 
their way with an inquirer by observation of face 
and voice. My own experience has proved that 
the most famous of them, when craftily led on, 
can go utterly astray. 

A story was told about Alexis, the great clair- 
voyant of his day, which, though no doubt a joke, 
probably pointed to the secret. A sceptic, it was 
said, made an appointment with Alexis for a 
seance and bade his wife at that time put the 
coal-scuttle on the drawing-room table. He re- 
turned converted, and reported to his wife that 
Alexis had told him that the coal-scuttle was on 
the table. *^ Bless me!" replied the wife, "I 
quite forgot to put it there." 

For any strange manifestations of nervous 
sensibility, and for any thaumaturgic performances 
for which they may afford scope, we are of course 
prepared. A school-fellow of mine, a nervous 
boy, was thrown by mock-mesmeric passes into a 
trance to get him out of which medical assistance 



SPIRITUAL VERSUS SUPERNATURAL 109 

was required. There are no doubt still mysteries 
in the physical nature of man. But they have 
nothing to do with spiritual life. There is no 
place for the supernatural, and in following that 
lure the spiritual may be lost. 

The case of wireless telegraphy is cited. But 
can there be transmission without a medium ? In 
the case of wireless telegraphy there is a known 
medium. In the case of telepathy no medium is 
known, nor does the existence of a medium seem 
possible. 

September, 1904. 



■" "^ - — - 



XXII 

A PROBLEM GREATER THAN TELEPATHY 

The last-cited case of telepathy is that of a 
loving wife filled with sudden anxiety by the silence 
of her absent husband, whom she afterwards finds 
to have been sick. Incidents such as this, dressed 
up by our retroactive fancy, become mysterious 
and the materials of a new faith. Our minds are 
thereby turned from questions really momentous 
in the solution of which we are called upon to 
help each other. 

One writer in the telepathic discussion glances 
at the question of a future state in a way which 
seems to imply that he hardly deems it pressing. 
Yet surely no question can be more pressing, if 
we have any means of solving it, than that of 
existence after death. I avoid the phrase ** im- 
mortality of the soul," because I cannot form an 
idea of immortality any more than I can of infinity 
or eternity, both of which elude conception. 

Conscience tells us that according as we do well 
or ill in this life it will be well or ill for us here- 

IIO 



A PROBLEM GREATER THAN TELEPATHY III 

after. Is the evidence of conscience less trust- 
worthy than that of our bodily senses? If the 
evidence of our bodily senses and the science built 
upon them alone is trustworthy, on what does 
their prerogative rest? May we not be in a uni- 
verse unseen by Newton or Darwin? 

That death wipes out the score of life and levels 
the best with the worst of men, the man who has 
been the benefactor with the one who has been the 
curse of his kind, is a belief from which our 
moral nature would seem to recoil as strongly as 
our physical nature recoils from anything con- 
tradictory of sense. 

Positivism, in place of the hope of personal 
existence hereafter, presents to us impersonal 
existence as a factor in the progress of humanity. 
But that which is not personal is not ours. 

What would be the consequence to society of 
the belief, if we should be driven to it, that death 
is the end? Would there be any rational induce- 
ment to self-sacrifice or effort for the common 
good? Would not struggle for the means of 
present enjoyment be in fact the true wisdom? 
Is not a tendency of this kind making itself felt 
as religious belief grows weak ? 



112 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

Old arguments of the natural kind no doubt are 
failing us. We can no longer hold with the good 
Bishop Butler that the soul is a being distinct 
from the body, indiscerptible, and therefore prob- 
ably indissoluble. We know that what we call 
the soul is the consummate outcome of the general 
frame. Nor can we, with Socrates, found our 
faith on a preexistence attested by the presence 
in us of innate ideas. When Socrates points to 
the distinction between the lyre and the melody 
as analogous to that between the body and the 
soul, a hearer replies at once that when the lyre 
is broken the melody dies. Of ghosts or spiritual- 
ist apparitions there is no need to speak. 

We are met with the cases of idiots, lunatics, 
children dying in infancy, savages, and others, 
who have not seen moral light. That argu- 
ment seems valid against universal resurrection, 
but not against the survival of responsibility 
where responsibility has been. 

Conscience implies the existence of a deity, to 
whose tribunal it appeals, as to that of a power 
which upholds righteousness and directs all in 
the end to good. It implies, not the freedom of 
the will, if by that is meant independence of ante- 



A PROBLEM GREATER THAN TELEPATHY II3 

cedents, but volition, the reality of which extreme 
materialism seems to deny. The exact relation 
between the antecedents and the volition we may 
not be able to define. The impelling motive, as 
was said before, seems not to be the only factor in 
action of which we are conscious. We are con- 
scious also of the exertion of the will, though not 
distinctly in actions where there is no conflict of 
motive, in actions where there is. The existence 
of volition, as well as of the antecedents, is as- 
sumed in all our judgments on our own actions 
and those of our fellows. 

October, 1904. 



XXIII 

DR. OSLER ON SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 

Dr. Osler's erudite and elegant lecture on 
"Science and Immortality" has just come into 
my hands. 

Dr. Osier plays gracefully with the subject. 
His own attitude towards the doctrine of a future 
life appears, to use his own phrase, to be "Gallio- 
nian." He seems to regard the doctrine as a 
beautiful but perfectly unpractical hypothesis. 
He winds up, indeed, with a faint affirmative and 
a mallem errare cum Platone. To me, I confess, 
the question seems one on which at the present 
time we can no more afford to err with Plato than 
we can to err with Eddy or Dowie. 

Philosophic dalliance with the problem of a 

future state may be more congenial to Dives than 

to Lazarus. If there is nothing beyond this life, 

what a spectacle is the state of Lazarus in the slums 

of New York ! What a spectacle is the life of the 

unfortunate generally! What a spectacle is His- 

114 



DR. OSLER ON SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY II5 

tory! Schopenhauer said, not that this was the 
worst of all conceivable, but that it was the worst 
of all possible worlds, and could not bear another 
grain of evil. There has been and is a terribly 
large proportion of the human race which might 
think that the pessimist told the truth. The 
crown of all things. Dr. Osier says, is man. If 
happiness is the criterion, what a crown ! 

^'Immortality" is inconceivable. We must dis- 
card the term. The question is whether our hopes 
and responsibilities extend beyond this world and 
life. Conscience says that they do. Conscience 
tells us that this world, its awards and its judg- 
ments, are not all, but that as we do well or ill in 
this life, it will be well or ill for us in the sum of 
things. What question can be more practical? 
Even taking it on the lowest ground, what would 
our social state be if vice and wickedness had only 
to bilk human law? Would not self-sacrifice be 
folly and martyrdom insanity? 

That physical science has nothing to say to 
this matter is true. But is physical science our 
only sure source of knowledge? Are our moral 
instincts less trustworthy than our physical sense ? 
As I have already said, I affirm nothing; but I 



Il6 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

call attention to the apparent fact that there is in 
man something of which the materialist still owes 
us an account. All may be, and in a sense no 
doubt is, the outcome of physical evolution. That 
does not seem to me to close the inquiry. What- 
ever the process of development. Dr. Osier is not 
a germ, but a man, well read in the noble literature 
of the seventeenth century. 

That men go about their daily work thinking 
little of a future state, as Dr. Osier says, is per- 
fectly true. But is not the influence of conscience, 
with what it implies, always there, unless it has 
been absolutely stifled, as in the case of consum- 
mate wickedness it probably is? Does not every 
man, when he obeys his conscience against his 
passions or his interest, virtually express a belief 
in something beyond this world? 

^^Teresianism," as Dr. Osier caUs the fervent 
belief, such as was that of St. Teresa, in the life 
to come, has, as he admits, produced the salt of 
the earth, which a mere falsehood could hardly 
have done. On the other hand, what followed 
when French Jacobinism and Terrorism had 
written over the gate of the cemetery: "Here is 
eternal sleep"? 



DR. OSLER ON SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 1 17 

The dull submission of the dying to the inevi- 
table, when, as in most cases, emotion is weakened, 
while death is often a release from pain, does not 
seem to me to go far toward proving that death 
is not a turning-point, but the end. From the old 
ecclesiastical terrors most men are now free. 

The conclusions of extreme materialism would 
be welcome to few. But if the materialist proves 
his case, we acquiesce. There is no hope for us 
in our present perplexities but in the frank accept- 
ance of all demonstrated truth. 

October, 1904. 



XXIV 

DISPENSING WITH THE SOUL 

One more word. On re-perusing Dr. Osier's 
very charming treatise, I find him saying that 
" modern psychological science dispenses altogether 
with the soul." With the soul as a separate entity 
breathed into the body at birth and parted from 
it at death all free thinkers now dispense. But 
has reason yet dispensed with spiritual life and 
its attendant hopes? Are we, as Dr. Osier ap- 
parently thinks, bound to admit the absolute 
prepotency of the "germ-plasm" and to assume 
that the limit of its physical development is the 
limit of ethical possibility? Is it not still con- 
ceivable that something different in kind from 
the germ-plasm may be the ultimate issue of the 
process? In fact, can one thing differ more in 
kind from another thing than Dr. Osier with his 
science and his culture differs in kind from the 
germ-plasm? If development goes so far, are 

ii8 



DISPENSING WITH THE SOUL 1 19 

we warranted in assuming that it cannot go farther 
and culminate in spiritual life? Does the germ- 
plasm contain the whole productive power and 
all the promise in itself? Left to itself, would 
it come to anything? Is it not indebted for its 
development to the vivifying and moulding influ- 
ences in which it is steeped? If it is, nothing in 
the germ-plasm itself can apparently be an abso- 
lute limitation. The germ is a starting-point, as 
was the particle in the nebula. The goal may be 
spiritual life; by which of course is meant 
not " spiritualism '^ or anything of that kind, 
but the life of moral aspiration and effort, 
with any promise or assurance which it may 
contain. 

The authority of conscience is a dream; there 
is no moral tribunal higher than that of human 
opinion and law; death levels the good with the 
wicked, the sensualist with the pure of heart, the 
man who has been a blessing with the man who 
has been a curse to his kind. Such is the con- 
clusion to which thorough-going materialism leads. 
We may have to face it. I have not said and do 
not say that we may not. But we want the ques- 
tion to be thoroughly discussed, and we maintain 



120 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

that it is not fanciful or dilettantist, but practical 
in the highest degree. Apart from spiritual hopes, 
would not social morality feel the change ? Is not 
social morality feeling the change already? 

December, 1904. 



XXV 

THE RELIGIOUS SITUATION 

The acceptance of my letters by the Sun has 
brought me many tokens of interest in the sub- 
ject to which they relate. Some of my corre- 
spondents have asked me for my theory. But I 
have no theory. All I pretend to do is to state 
the case and invite opinion. 

The subject is one of interest, practical as well 
as deep, were it only from its bearing on the future 
position of the clergy. What are clergymen on 
whose minds the light of criticism has dawned 
hereafter to do? Renan and others like him 
seem in effect to wish that the clergy should con- 
tinue to preach a religion suited to the multitude, 
while they, the sons of light, sit aloft in light by 
themselves. But will learned and conscientious 
men, as your clergy must be, be found to preach 
wholesome falsehood for a State purpose, and, 
like Roman augurs, to laugh each other in the 
face when they meet? 



122 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

If ultra-materialism is true, man is a mere 
development of the germ-plasm. There is no 
ground for belief in a moral government of the 
universe. Conscience, if it speaks of a tribunal 
higher than the human, lies. Death ends all for 
us, and levels us all. When we die, it signifies 
nothing whether our life has been good or evil. 
Materialists say that the evildoer will be punished 
by remorse for a wasted life. But how can his 
life be said to have been wasted if he has supped 
full of pleasure, gratified every passion, and bilked 
human justice? Positivism tells us that we shall 
live for good or evil in the future of the race. 
What interest, when we have personally ceased 
to be, shall we have in the future of the race? 
After all, in what will the race end ? 

Dogmatic and miraculous Christianity we resign: 
But the vital principles of Christianity, the father- 
hood of God and the brotherhood of man, still 
rest on their historical and moral evidences as a 
key to the moral problem of our being. At the 
same time Christianity, by throwing off dogma 
and miracle, is rid of one of its heaviest burdens. 
There is no longer a barrier between Christendom 
and the rest of humanity. The term '^heathen'' 



THE RELIGIOUS SITUATION 1 23 

becomes unmeaning. Socrates, Epictetus, Marcus 
Aurelius, are no longer consigned to the uncove- 
nanted mercies of God. We live henceforth 
under an ampler sky. 

There is no use in guessing at the nature of the 
Power which fills and moves the universe. We 
cannot hope to delineate or define the inconceiv- 
able. The world visible to us presents to our 
senses a perplexing mixture of that which to us 
is good with that which to us is evil, of order with 
disorder, of beneficence with cruelty, of beauty 
with the unbeautiful. We cannot solve the 
mystery. Bridgewater Treatises, picking out in- 
stances of order and beneficence and saying 
nothing about the opposites, no longer afford us 
help. Human excellence is attainable only through 
effort, which implies a struggle with evil. This, 
apart from revelation, is apparently the only hint 
of a solution that we have. Yet it is difficult to 
believe that rational being is confined to this 
planet or that nothing speaks to us through the 
majesty and glory of the universe. 

Conscience, says Bishop Butler, a keen anato- 
mist of human nature, if it had power as it has 
authority, would rule the world. Conscience tells 



124 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

US that as we do well or ill it will be well or ill 
for us in the end. Is this delusion? Is con- 
science or is it not really a part of our nature ? 
If it is, have we any special ground for refusing 
its evidence more than for refusing that of our 
physical senses on which all science, moral or 
physical, rests? After all, what is truth but that 
which, by the constitution of our nature, we can- 
not help believing? Is any man without a con- 
science? There are men who crush it, perhaps 
silence it in themselves; but is any man without 
it? 

That notions of duty vary considerably from 
age to age may be admitted. But conscience 
always declares for duty as we see it at the time 
against the forces of passion or self-love. 

It may be true that conscience, like other parts 
of our nature, including the scientific faculties, is 
developed by an evolutionary process. This does 
not affect its authority. When developed, it is 
here. We must, however, be allowed to challenge 
the claim of the germ-plasm to prepotency and 
finality. The germ-plasm is the starting-point of 
a development which, carried forward and moulded 
by a variety of influences, culminates in Socrates. 



THE RELIGIOUS SITUATION 12$ 

But Socrates is not a germ-plasm any more than he 
is a particle in the nebula from which the germ- 
plasm itself is an emanation. That man had his 
foundation in the dust we have long believed. 
For dust put radium, if you will; but con- 
science, moral aspiration, spiritual affection, the 
sense of spiritual beauty, idealization, are, if our 
inner sense does not utterly mislead us, higher in 
their nature than dust. 

February, 1905. 



XXVI 

IS MATERIALISM ADVANCING? 

It would seem that the answer to the question 
whether materiahsm has been making way must 
partly depend on the meaning attached to the 
word. My friend Professor Tyndall, as I think I 
have said before, called himself, and insisted upon 
being called, a materialist, because, as a man of 
science, he believed that in matter was the poten- 
tiality of all things. Yet in sentiment, character, 
and aspirations no human being could be less 
material. In this I believe he was the type of 
many who, though they have embraced the mate- 
rialist hypothesis, remain spiritual in character 
and aim. 

It can scarcely be denied that between the higher 
criticism on one side and Darwin's momentous 
discovery on the other, materialism, in the scien- 
tific and philosophic sense, positive or negative, 
is gaining ground. We are called upon at all 

events to find a new warrant for spiritual life, for 

126 



IS MATERIALISM ADVANCING ? 127 

reliance on the dictates of conscience, for any 
hopes that we may have cherished of existence 
beyond the grave, for confidence in a divine order 
of the universe. We can no longer believe that 
the miscellany of Hebrew writings, many of them 
of doubtful authorship and date, some of them 
plainly mythical, are a divine revelation. Nor 
is anything to be hoped from an attempt to evade 
the difficulty by suggesting that Deity, in its deal- 
ings with man, had to accommodate itself to the 
Darwinian law of evolution. Of the Gospels, 
criticism has spared only the character and teach- 
ings of Jesus, which, on any hypothesis, have 
given birth to Christendom. In the authenticity, 
contemporaneity, harmony of the documents, we 
can confide no more. We can no longer sincerely 
accept the evidence for the Incarnation, the 
Immaculate Conception, the miracles, the Resur- 
rection; or deem it such as would certainly have 
been given in proof of a revelation which was to 
be the light of the world. Moreover, the Fall 
being a myth, as it is now allowed almost on all 
hands to be, there is no ground for the Incarnation 
and the Atonement, a disclosure which in itself 
is fatal to the dogmatic and traditional creed of 



128 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

Christendom. Nor, we must sorrowfully confess, 
is the collapse of our evidences limited to the case 
of revelation. It extends to that of natural 
religion. Bishop Butler's proof of immortality, 
resting on the separate existence of the soul as 
an entity breathed into the body at birth and 
released from it at death, has been swept away by 
evolution. Theism itself has been seriously called 
in question, and arguments founded on the proofs 
of universal beneficence, such as the writers of the 
Bridgewater Treatises deemed conclusive, will un- 
happily no longer avail. The wrench is great; 
but through frank abandonment of that which 
cannot be sustained lies our only road to truth. 

For the first time perhaps in history, man stands 
with his unassisted reason, independent of any 
revelation or tradition, in face of the mystery of 
his existence and of the order of the universe. If 
there is any historical precedent, it is probably the 
position of the Greek philosophers. But the Greek 
philosophers were children in science. Their cos- 
mic speculations were ingenious guesses. Besides, 
they had not absolutely renounced the State religion. 
Socrates worshipped the gods of the State, and 
bequeathed an offering to ^Esculapius. Little will 



IS MATERIALISM ADVANCING ? 1 29 

be found in the Greek philosophy at all helpful to 
present investigation. The thought of the Roman 
stoics was given to the formation of personal char- 
acter. Nor is there much to aid us in the phi- 
losophy of the Voltairean era. It had no Darwin. 
It is extremely controversial, and therefore want- 
ing in breadth and in calmness of vision. Besides, 
neither Voltaire nor Rousseau is independent 
of theistic tradition. Voltaire, as we remember, 
avowed his belief that the fear of God was neces- 
sary to save our throats from being cut; and he 
built a church with the inscription, "Deo Erexit 
Voltaire," which, if he had said what he felt, 
would perhaps have been " Voltairio Erexit Deus." 
No one surely can treat these questions lightly. 
No one can think that even in a social point of 
view it matters nothing whether death ends and 
cancels all or whether conscience is a delusion. 
Dr. Osier may be right in saying that most people 
think little about a future life. This may be 
partly because the future life has been presented 
to them in a guise which no mind can grasp, and 
which is at variance with their practical sense of 
justice and mercy. Still, the belief has been there ; 
and so has the authority of conscience. The 



130 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

churches are a momentous part of our social 
organization, and on these beliefs they rest. 
Habit and opinion will sustain them, probably 
are now sustaining many of them, after the de- 
parture of positive belief. They may glide, as 
not a few of them are now gliding, into social 
congregations, spiritual in their tone, with moral 
objects, and under highly cultivated leadership. 
There are already inklings of such a change. 

Inquiry has happily become earnest, calm, and 
tolerant. It may yet end in inducing the germ- 
plasm to limit its unbounded pretensions and leave 
room for the continued existence of spiritual life, 
and of such hopes as may reasonably be attached 
thereto. A new religion independent of tradition 
may yet be born. 

In the meantime there is a natural tendency to 
take refuge in fantastic speculations of the spiritu- 
alist kind against which we have to be on our 
guard. 

April, 1905. 



XXVII 

DOUBT AND ITS FRUITS 

"B. D., OxoN./' I can conscientiously assure 
him, mistakes my position if he thinks that 
my object is destructive. That which cannot 
be maintained, it seems to me, we ought frankly 
to resign, that we may hold fast that which can. 
What is really injurious to the clergy is the sugges- 
tion that they should continue to preach for pur- 
poses of expediency that which has ceased to be 
believed. To what extent the doubts manifestly 
prevalent among the laity may have spread to 
the clergy, I do not pretend to say. That they 
have spread to some extent surely cannot be 
gainsaid. 

The volume of letters about religion entitled 
"Do We Believe?", a selection from nine 
thousand sent to the London Daily Telegraph 
in three months, is a proof that the subject 
has living and general interest. This book is a 
fair mirror of opinion, and in two respects is 

131 



132 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

welcome. It proves at once the triumph of 
toleration and the earnestness of quest for truth. 
Of dogmatic narrowness or bitterness there is 
hardly a trace. We are in a far better and more 
hopeful state than Christendom was a hundred 
years ago. 

The collection is divided into three parts: 
"Faith," "Unfaith," and "Doubt.'^ Doubt is 
hardly distinguishable from Unfaith. Nor does 
Faith make any serious stand for the evidences. 
The stand it makes is for Christian character and 
the consolations of religion. Even Archbishop 
Temple, when interrogated about the miracles, 
can only say that omnipotence had always power 
to perform them, and that the absence of them 
in our day is no proof of their absence in past 
times; two propositions which a sceptic might 
subscribe. Unfaith and Doubt are left in pos- 
session of the critical field, and they are able to 
cite startling admissions on the clerical side, such 
as that of an ecclesiastic of eminence who gives 
up as mythical the virgin birth of the Redeemer. 

On the other hand, Unfaith and Doubt generally 
accept the Christian view of character and the 
Christian rule of life. They place happiness in 



DOUBT AND ITS FRUITS I33 

benevolence, which is taken to be its own reward. 
On what is that assumption founded if there is 
no God or Hereafter ? If conscience is a delusion, 
and death clears all scores, what have we to say 
to the man who indulges his lust and escapes the 
law? He may be a social nuisance, but how can 
you show that, from his own point of view, he is 
unwise? ^^Man," says one bold doubter, ^^lives 
in a world which gets its living by lying and deceit. 
You must fight that world with its own weapons. 
And if you are sharp enough, you will become 
a respected member of society." What have we 
to say to the man if he wins his game ? 

If this life is all, what a spectacle is history! 
What is there to redeem the picture of the bar- 
barism or pain and misery in which m)n:iads 
have lived and died, in which millions are still 
living and dying ? Is it easy to confute the pessi- 
mist who wishes that such a world had never been ? 

A bishop is cited as averring that the doctrine 
of the Sermon on the Mount would never do for 
foreign policy or for the management of States. 
The precepts of the Sermon on the Mount are in 
the language of Oriental hj^erbole. However, 
they are not meant for foreign policy or for the 



134 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

management of States, which Jesus never had 
before his mind, but put aside with the precept, 
"Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's.'* 
Jesus recognized the calHng of the soldier and the 
authority of pubHc law. St. Louis of France 
acted even in his foreign relations on the Christian 
principle, with results not altogether disastrous. 

If, as the result of this discussion, theism losesreve- 
lation, it ceases to be perplexed by attempts to grasp 
eternity and infinity, to excogitate a primum mobile, 
to reconcile almighty goodness with the existence of 
evil. Is conscience the voice of the Power which 
rules our world ? Are moral effort and struggle to- 
wards perfection the dispensation under which we 
live ? If so, our life is not without a guiding light. 

Immortality passes our conceptions. We now 
know, too, that the soul is not a being separate 
from the body, enclosed in it at birth and severed 
from it at death. Still, spiritual life may be a reaHty 
and may be instinct with further hopes. The imper- 
sonal immortality in the progress of the race which 
Positivism offers us is little consoling. If a man con- 
tributes to the progress of the race, and in that 
sense lives in it, so it may be said does anything 
that helps progress, a beast of burden or a machine. 



DOUBT AND ITS FRUITS 135 

Christianity, ceasing to be a revelation, does 
not cease to be moral light. It has produced 
Christendom, and Christendom has been nearly 
conterminous with moral civilization. This is 
matter of history. Nor has the moral influence 
of Christianity been confined to the doctrinal 
pale. What is to be the moral code of materialism 
we have yet to learn. The moral code of ag- 
nosticism is still Christian. 

Let me repeat that I do not presume to broach 
a theory. My aim is only to keep in the right 
path, frankly to resign whatever has been dis- 
proved, to be cautious in accepting the extreme 
conclusions of a new-born materialism riding on 
the wings of a grand discovery, and to avoid 
the misleading fancies which swarm in the eclipse 
of religion, such as spiritualism, clairvoyance, 
planchette, and telepathic revelation. Especially 
do I wish to challenge proof of the assumption, 
fatal to spiritual life and its hopes, that the germ- 
plasm, as it is the beginning of our being, must 
be the limit of its development and its end. In 
this at all events I may hope to have " B. D., Oxon.," 
on my side. 

May, 1905. 



XXVIII 

THE ANGLICAN PETITION FOR FREEDOM 

I THANK the Sun for putting me in a right 
Hght and pointing out that my object is not to 
aid in destruction, but rather to ascertain the real 
hmits of the destructive process, and especially 
to challenge what appeared to me to be the extreme 
assumptions of the materialist school. We seek, 
amid these troubled waters, to find, if possible, 
some anchorage for a reasonable faith. 

The inquiry is partly historical, and as such 
comes within the province of a student of history. 
The part which is strictly theological would more 
properly belong to our theological guides if only 
their thought and utterance were free. 

A number of Anglican divines, including some 
of rank and reputation, plead for liberty to deal 
honestly with the New Testament in the light of 
critical investigation. By the heads of the Cana- 
dian Church at Montreal they are pointed to the 
door and told that in that way they may save their 

136 



THE ANGLICAN PETITION FOR FREEDOM 1 37 

honor; as though honor were separable from 
loyalty to truth. This awakens us to the disad- 
vantage under which this vital inquiry is being 
pursued. The clergy of all denominations, the 
men by vocation set apart, by their training 
specially equipped, by their personal aspirations 
dedicated to the service of spiritual life, are by 
their ordination vows debarred from conscien- 
tious inquiry. They are fettered by doctrinal 
chains forged in days of imperfect knowledge and 
sectarian strife, in some cases fully as much by 
the hand of political power as by that of theologi- 
cal conviction. Is it not our interest that they 
should be set free? 

To take the case of the present remonstrants. 
I happened many years ago to be the guest of my 
revered and beloved friend Archbishop Tait when 
he was called upon to decide a question of ritual. 
Being occupied at the time, he turned me into 
his library to look up the historical point for him. 
In doing so I could not help being struck with 
the fact that the code of belief and worship by 
which all the clergy of the Church of England 
were to be unalterably bound was the motley and 
ambiguous product of a series of revolutions, 



138 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

all of which were the immediate work, not of 
spiritual authority or conviction, but of political 
power, and of political power in far from spiritual 
hands. The first two revolutions, that conducted 
by Thomas Cromwell and the reaction which 
afterwards followed the change of ascendency 
in the King's Council, were the work of Henry 
VIII. The third was the work of the intriguing 
politicians who formed the Council of Edward VI. 
The last, and that which has left the deepest trace, 
was the work of Elizabeth, for whose character 
unspiritual is the mildest term, and of the worldly- 
wise statesmen of her reign. Through all the 
stages of the transition the secular power can be 
proved to have been supreme. The ecclesiastical 
Convocation was set at naught. The Anglican 
compromise between the old and the new faith 
which the statesmen of the reign of Elizabeth 
installed might be politic for the time, but interest, 
not conviction, is the region of compromise, 
and the history of the Anglican Church has been 
an intermittent wrestle between the Catholic 
and Protestant ideals, closely connected with 
political party, which under Charles I. broke out 
in political revolution. This may be said without 



THE ANGLICAN PETITION FOR FREEDOM 1 39 

withholding from Anglican piety its due or failing 
to recognize the service done by it to Christendom. 

We now see the two elements contending for 
the possession of the Church under the supremacy 
of a Parliament for which Anglican belief is no 
longer a qualification and in which religious 
interests of any kind can hardly be said to prevail. 
High Churchmen are desperately contending for 
the liberty of interpreting the Protestant Articles 
by the light of the semi-Catholic Liturgy. The 
Articles were framed after the Liturgy and are 
a dogmatic and original manifesto, which the 
Liturgy is not. Rich though such an institution 
may be in personal and pastoral excellence, how 
can its formularies be, as the Montreal Episcopate 
seems to think that they are, a final determination 
of religious belief? 

What is said of the Anglican Church may be 
said of all other churches, the clergy of which 
are bound by stereotyped creeds, products of 
antiquated controversy or enthusiasm now ex- 
tinct, and by ordination vows. Little, it would 
seem, can be done by revising the Thirty-nine 
Articles, the Westminster Confession, or any 
other standard of belief. To prove all things 



140 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

and hold fast that which is good is surely the only 
ordination vow fit to be imposed at the present 
time upon a keeper and teacher of religious truth. 
If amid these doubts and difficulties we look to 
the clergy for guidance, ought we not to begin 
by setting them free? Freedom would entail 
no secession, no renunciation, no change of con- 
viction other than such as conscience might 
require. 

While I write, a Presbyterian clergyman is 
praying for complete emancipation from the 
shackles of the Westminster Confession. 

May, 1905. 



XXIX 

THE REMEDY FOR RELIGIOUS DOUBT 

The Sun has been receiving communication 
speaking bitterly of ^ these letters. Their writer 
does not fail to receive outpourings of feeling, 
now from the side of orthodoxy, which denounces 
him as an atheist, now from the side of ultra-mate- 
rialism, which taxes him with cowardly adherence 
to theistic superstition. He is but one of many 
who in these days of perplexity and doubt are 
trying to find some secure foundation for belief 
in the moral government of the universe, in the 
authority of conscience, and in the more hopeful 
view of the change which is to take place at death. 
For the aged perhaps the last question has more 
pressing interest than for the young. 

The Sun tells us that there is an increase of 

formal membership in the orthodox, a decrease 

in the more rationalistic, churches. Granting 

this to be the case, does it denote a decrease of 

rationalism and an increase of orthodox belief? 

141 



142 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

Would a seceder from an orthodox Church be 
likely at once to register himself elsewhere? Is 
formal membership proof of unshaken conviction ? 
Judging from my observation in England, I should 
say that it was not. Does not this increased resort 
to aesthetic attractions betray a feeling of mistrust ? 
Do we not hear from one church after another, 
now from the Presbyterian, now from the Anglican, 
an appeal of conscientious and enlightened clergy- 
men for a removal or relaxation of tests? Has 
not unrest been disclosed by a series of trials 
for heresy? Have not leading clergymen of the 
Church of England petitioned for liberty to deal 
freely and critically with the New Testament? 
Has not Presbyterianism produced the writings 
of Robertson Smith? Is not the ^'Encyclopaedia 
Biblica," in which the resurrection of Christ is 
treated as a vision, edited by a Canon of the Angli- 
can Church and professor of theology at Oxford ? 
We surely have come to a crisis in the history 
of religion and all that rests upon it. 

There might be less disposition to cling to tra- 
ditional formularies of belief and greater willing- 
ness to set the clergy, our natural guides, free 
from their present shackles if we had present 



THE REMEDY FOR RELIGIOUS DOUBT 1 43 

to our minds the extent to which denominational 
creeds had been fixed, not by spiritual authority 
of any kind, but by secular power, and largely 
for political ends. In the case of the Anglican 
Church it may, I think, be clearly shown that from 
the commencement gf the religious revolution 
under Henry VIII. to its close under Elizabeth 
the representation of the clergy never had an 
effective voice. Convocation, had it been allowed, 
would have perpetuated the Catholic settlement 
of Mary; and of the episcopate, in the eyes of 
Anglicans a special channel of true belief, all 
the members but one, or if Sodor and Man 
is to be counted, two, resigned. In the Scotch 
Reformation also influence distinctly political 
was very strong. 

One is surprised to find that a champion of 
Catholicism writing to the Sun can point to 
300,000,000 nominal Catholics as testifying by 
their unshaken belief to the stability of his church. 
In the Papal city itself, while Ignatius Loyola 
still rests in his shrine of lapis lazuli and gold, 
not far off rises the statue of Giordano Bruno, 
erected by ^'the age which he foresaw" on the 
spot where he was burned. But where would 



144 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

even nominal Catholicism now be if political 
power had not in Italy, France, Spain, Austria, 
Bavaria, the Spanish Netherlands, forcibly crushed 
freedom of inquiry ? The principle on which after 
the Thirty Years' War the States of Germany were 
practically settled was that the political sovereignty 
should determine the State religion. With polit- 
ical liberty has come freedom of thought, and with 
freedom of thought the questionings about tradi- 
tional belief and about the mysteries of our being to 
which only reasonable satisfaction can put an end. 
Let those who shrink with horror from the spread 
of free inquiry draw encouragement and charity 
at the same time from a grand example. Glad- 
stone, as Morley's Life of him shows, was to the 
end of his days a High Churchman, intensely 
religious, a believer in special providence, in the 
inspiration of Scripture, in the efficacy of prayer. 
Yet he could not only associate and act heartily 
with free thinkers, but look with satisfaction 
on the activity of the general conscience, and say 
that while there had never been an age so much 
perplexed with doubt, there had never been one 
so full of the earnest pursuit of truth. 

June, 1905. 



XXX 

THE ORiaiN OF LIFE 

We are told that the origin of life has at last been 
discovered. This, if it is true, might seem to 
make the case in favor of materialism complete. 
But is it the origin of life that has been discovered 
or only the beginning of life on this planet ? That 
sooner or later the beginning of life on this planet 
would be discovered by science v^as almost cer- 
tain. But the beginning of life on this planet 
cannot be assumed to be its origin. Something 
there must apparently have been in that particular 
particle in which life commenced distinguishing 
it from other particles and from matter in general. 
If the source of this has been found, the origin 
of life has been discovered; otherwise what has 
been discovered is not the source, but only the 
beginning. The proof of physical evolution is 
heartily accepted. But as at present advised, 
we challenge the assumption that physical devel- 
opment out of a germ-plasm is the beginning and 
end of all. 

L 145 



146 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

We must be patient and make it our great aim 
at present to keep on the right path to truth. 
It is said that we need not fear the ascendency 
of materiaHsm, since at present ''Psychism" 
is coming on us in a flood. Yet spiritualism, 
wrongly so called, since the apparitions have 
to materialize in order that their presence may 
be felt, seems to have been pretty well exploded, 
with all its accessories, table turning, clairvoyance, 
and planchette. Professor Hyslop gently rebuked 
me the other day for requiring that the communi- 
cations of the spirit should be dignified. The 
showmen of the spirits, however, deem it neces- 
sary to maintain that they are. 

Telepathy still claims recognition; but no at- 
tempt has yet been made on behalf of this wire- 
less telegraphy of the soul to suggest a possible 
medium of transition. 

Undoubtedly there are mysteries still to be 
explored in our physical nature. The mystery 
of memory, for example, and that of the creative 
imagination in dreams. But no discoveries in 
this direction apparently can confirm the author- 
ity of conscience or establish the foundations 
of religion. 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 1 47 

An eminent Canadian journal contends that 
what appears to be the disturbance of rehgious 
belief is in fact merely the progress of theological 
science, analogous to the progress of other sciences. 
It asks whether, when all the other sciences are 
advancing, we can expect the ^' queen of the 
sciences" to stand still. The term ^^ queen of 
the sciences" applied to theology is mediaeval, 
and what the queen of mediaeval science was, 
the perusal of a few pages of Thomas Aquinas 
will show. Mediaeval theology assumed as pos- 
tulates the very things which are now in question, 
and spun out from them an immense web of 
deductions which were taken for supreme truth. 
The mediaeval queen of the sciences is to-day 
as dead as alchemy. 

June, 1905. 



XXXI 

RATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 

The present writer's ^'attitude toward Chris- 
tianity" has been the subject of lively comment 
in clerical quarters. He is denounced as an 
"atheist/' a term which seems to be deemed 
applicable to one who, though he has by no means 
renounced theistic belief, has lost faith in the 
evidences of a miraculous revelation and in the 
authority of dogma. My attitude, and I appre- 
hend not mine alone, is that of one who has heard 
the words of the Founder of Christendom on a 
hillside in Galilee. No miracle was needed to 
confirm belief in his words, nor was any performed 
by him on that occasion. Of dogma nothing 
fell from his lips. 

The evidence of Christianity to people of my 
way of thinking is the character which it has pro- 
duced and the effect which its approximate in- 
fluence has had on the progress of mankind, 
notwithstanding all the adverse forces, including 

148 



RATIONAL CHRISTIANITY I49 

the perversion of religion itself by Popes, Inquisi- 
tions, Jesuits, and fanatics of various kinds. 
No other creed, Buddhist, Mohammedan, or 
Rousseauist, has shown such power for good. 

"I express myself with caution lest I should 
be mistaken to vilify reason, which is indeed 
the only faculty we have to judge concerning any- 
thing, even revelation itself; or be misunderstood 
to assert that a supposed revelation cannot be 
proved false from internal characters." So says 
Bishop Butler, of all apologists the greatest. 
If reason has been given us by the author of our 
being as our guide and our sole guide to truth, 
are not the discoveries of science and criticism 
as really revelations as though they had been 
dictated to* an inspired penman or proclaimed 
amid the thunders of Sinai? 

Of the miracles not one is better attested than 
the casting out of devils into a herd of swine at 
Gadara. Mark the apologetic agonies of Dean 
Farrar and other orthodox commentators in dealing 
with this passage. Are their devices less injurious 
to Christianity than the belief that in this case as 
in many others there has gathered about the adored 
head a halo of miracle; miracle in this case, 



I50 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

like the character, wholly beneficent, not destruc- 
tive or mere display of power? 

As to dogma, the whole structure apparently 
rests on the Mosaic account of the Creation and 
of the Fall of Man. Without the Fall there could 
have been no room for the Incarnation and the 
Atonement. But who, in the face of the discoveries 
of science, can continue to believe in the Mosaic 
account of Creation and the Fall of Man? 

It must be added that throughout the Bible, 
and notably in the Gospel histories, the presenta- 
tion is distinctly geocentric. To those writers this 
earth of ours, and the heaven which over-arched 
it and was the abode of Deity, were the universe. 
This earth was the entire scene of divine action. 
Man was the sole object of divine care. Astron- 
omy has now taught us that heaven is not an 
arch over this planet and that there are more 
worlds than one. 

August, 1905. 



XXXII 

FREE THOUGHT AND CHURCHMANSHIP 

The question was started by a critic the other 
day whether a Christian of my way of thinking 
could be a member of the Anglican Church. 
A professor of the Anglican creed he could not 
be, though he might sit in an Anglican pew. But 
he might find himself in other respects out of 
place. I attend a church where I am safe against 
religious recognition of war. Till materialism 
has thoroughly proved its case, a man, as I said 
before, will hardly do well, as it seems to me, in 
cutting himself off from religious life. 

Extreme materialism lays it down that the three 
great obstacles to our well-being are the belief 
in a God, the belief in immortality, and the belief 
in the freedom of the will. It is not easy to see 
what special harm pure theism has done. Its 
effects might be thought even to give it some 
claim to consideration as a practical key. Im- 
mortality in the strict sense is unthinkable, and 

151 



152 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

the doctrine has been presented in a form which 
shocks. But without that beHef in account- 
abihty which is the support of conscience the world 
would hardly have been better than it is. 

Nor apparently would man have been better 
braced for improving effort by the belief that he 
was an automaton and that responsibility was 
a dream. The frank abandonment of that which 
reason, our only guide, as Bishop Butler says, 
has disproved is the first step toward the attain- 
ment of truth. Free thought does frankly abandon, 
although it may be with a sigh, whatever science 
and criticism have disproved. It admits the 
difficulty of the theistic hypothesis arising from 
the conflict in the universe of that which seems 
to us disorder and evil with that which seems to 
us order and good. It lays Paley's "Evidences" 
and the Bridgewater Treatises on the shelf. 

But reason surely bids us be on our guard, not 
only against the influence of tradition which now, 
among the educated, lingers chiefly in clerical 
circles, and even there is tempered by "Lux 
Mundi," but against the rush of physical dis- 
covery and the immediate assumption that the 
germ-plasm which science, overturning our infan- 



FREE THOUGHT AND CHURCHMANSHIP I $3 

tine creeds, has shown to be the beginning of 
human life, must carry _in it the Hmitation of 
human development, aspiration, and hope. 

That surely is a critical moment in the history 
of man in which he first confronts the enigma 
of the universe and of his own being and destiny 
with reason enlightened by science and unclouded 
by tradition. Single thinkers may have done this 
before. But they were still in the penumbra 
of tradition and had comparatively little of the 
light of science. Tradition could still tender 
as evidence of the Noachic deluge the finding of 
fossil shells at high elevations, and philosophy 
could reply that the shells were cockles dropped 
by palmers from their hats in crossing the moun- 
tains. 

Can these inquiries be deemed profitless? 
Does it matter nothing to a man whether his 
death may be change in being or annihilation? 
Does it matter nothing to society whether the 
witness of conscience is true? Dr. Osier makes 
light, and thinks that people in general make 
light, of the question about the immortality 
of the soul. Perhaps, as was hinted before, the 
form in which the doctrine was presented, repelling 



154 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

belief, has had something to do with the levity. 
However, Dr. Osier is happy in this life. So 
probably it would be found are most of his Gal- 
lionian compeers. But if happiness is the object, 
and this life is the end, what balm has Dr. Osier 
for the less fortunate? 

"M. C. G." arraigns me as a destroyer of the 
supernatural, without which he deems we should 
be lost. This seems to imply that God is not 
in nature. But the theist believes that God is 
in nature and is manifested through it. 

September, 1905. 



XXXIII 

RELIGION AND MORALITY 

A CORRESPONDENT of the Suu, after asking 
whether reHgion was the only vehicle by which 
ethics could be instilled into the mind of a child, 
went on in effect, if I understood him aright, to 
discard religion as a basis of morality, holding 
our only moral standard to be ^Hhe will and 
opinion of the majority.'' The religious basis 
he regards as a figment of the sacerdotal caste. 
Some religious systems, he says, have been lower- 
ing to humanity; which is unquestionably true. 

To fabricate a religion, or uphold one which 
had been proved false, as a foundation for morality 
would plainly be worse than folly. That house 
would be built on something weaker than sand. 
Let us all lay this to heart. 

The will and opinion of the majority would 
furnish a rule and criterion of social action and, 
embodied in municipal law, would regulate the 
conduct of those who were unable to defy or elude 

155 



156 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

the law. Would they move to virtuous effort, 
to the formation of a high character, to benevo- 
lence, to self-sacrifice? Take the whole vocabu- 
lary of moral aspiration, excellence, and beauty; 
translate it into that of conformity to the will and 
opinion of the majority, and a great deal would 
surely be lost. 

Under many forms and names, as self -culture, 
benevolence, self-devotion, patriotism, pure love, 
even as poetry and sense of beauty, something 
seems to be at work in the universe and to be 
approximately asserting itself, which is not the 
will and opinion of the majority or mere social 
expediency, and which takes the forms of religions 
varying in their character and dignity. The Greek 
pantheon is sensual. The State religion of Greece 
is irrational. But in Greek sentiment, as expressed 
in history, drama, poetry, even apart from philos- 
ophy, you find that which seems to be not the will 
and opinion of the majority or expediency in any 
form, but the essential spirit of religion. 

Even in our respect for the sanctity of human 
life is there not a certain religious element? 
Could it exist in full force without the idea of a 
brotherhood of man, which seems to imply, if not 



RELIGION AND MORALITY 1 57 

a distinct belief in the fatherhood of God, some- 
thing beyond mere identity of species? Is not a 
somewhat diminished sanctity of human Hfe 
already showing itself as a concomitant of the 
decay of religion? 

One correspondent of the Sun seems to sus- 
pect that those of my way of thinking are edging 
towards mediaeval faiths which have faded away. 
For my part toward nothing mediaeval am I con- 
scious of edging. Mediaeval dogmatism denounces 
me as an atheist. I have made it clear, I hope, 
that I presume not to propound any theory of my 
own. I fully share the doubts and perplexities of 
the time. I only plead for three things. The 
first is a recognition of the vital importance, even 
on social grounds, of the question between ex- 
treme materialism and faith in spiritual life. The 
second is fair consideration of all the phenomena 
of humanity and not of physiological phenomena 
alone. The third is a perfectly free, however 
cautious and reverent, search for truth. That 
there is at present '^something in this world amiss" 
is terribly certain. Faith and hope quail before 
the proofs of it. But something is struggling to 
"unriddle" it, and it seems too early yet to succumb 



158 IN- QUEST OF LIGHT 

to the belief that we are only a very superior 
class of the beasts that perish, some of us, no doubt, 
with much higher pleasures, but all of us with 
keener, and too many of us with infinitely keener, 
pains. 

October, 1905. 



XXXIV 

THE CONFERENCE OF THE CHURCHES 

This anxious conference of the Churches 
shows that they beHeve a rehgious crisis to be 
at hand. It is a social crisis also. Though 
the ideas of God and a future state may not 
have been very distinct or always present, who 
can doubt that they, with conscience, the author- 
ity of which depends upon them, have had 
a practical influence; that they have reconciled 
people in general to the dispensation and to 
the terrible inequalities of the human lot ? Social 
science in the end may take their place. But 
there seems not unlikely to be a perilous inter- 
regnum. Do we not already see an increase 
of intensity in the struggle for the wealth and 
pleasures of this world? 

It is difficult to get true statistics of church- 
going, still more difficult to learn how much of it 
is religious, how much is social. That a good deal 

159 



l60 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

of it is social appears certain. In the case of the 
State Church of England not a little of it probably 
is political. I think I have even known churches 
to be built or restored from political motives by 
avowed sceptics. The State Church is torn by 
parties which would break it up were not the 
ecclesiastical polity maintained by a Parliament 
full of dissenters and unbelievers. In all the 
Churches, notably in those of which the clergy 
are most highly educated, there are searchings of 
heart, heresy trials, struggles to loosen the bonds 
of the old creeds, such as the Westminster Con- 
fession. Even in the Anglican Church free criti- 
cism of the Bible has been gaining ground and 
High Churchmen write such books as "Lux 
Mundi." Anglicans are struggling to get rid of 
the Athanasian Creed, though only in paradoxical 
and denunciatory form does it differ from the 
other creeds. The Mosaic account of the Creation 
and the Fall of Man may be said to have been 
generally abandoned. With it apparently must go 
the dogmas of the Atonement and the Incarnation. 
We are not at liberty to rationalize the sacred nar- 
rative and substitute for that which science has 
confuted a pure invention of our own. On what 



THE CONFERENCE OF THE CHURCHES l6l 

grounds then could the Unitarians be excluded 
from the conference of the Churches? 

Christianity was in its origin a moral, not a 
dogmatic revelation. In its great manifesto, the 
Sermon on the Mount, there is not a word of 
dogma. Nor is there anything really dogmatic in 
the Epistles of St. Paul, though dogma of rather 
a portentous kind has been distilled from them. 
Their soul is passionate love of the character of 
the Founder, with fervid faith in the new mo- 
rality. Dogma makes its first appearance in the 
Fourth Gospel, which is proved by other signs 
to be the work not of a Palestinian but of an 
Alexandrian Jew. Now comes Hellenic theosophy 
with its metaphysical theories about the nature of 
Deity, its Logos, its Homo-ousians and Homoi- 
ousians, its Trinitarian orthodoxies and Arian 
heresies, its Decrees of Ecclesiastical Councils 
regulating theological fancies and making pro- 
fession of them a condition of Christian member- 
ship as well as a test of Christian faith. Then, 
the Church having become the thrall of the State, 
and that State being the Byzantine despotism, 
orthodoxy becomes loyalty and heresy becomes 
treason. State persecution is the natural result. 



1 62 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

Presently we have Popes instigating the Norman 
to the conquest of England and Ireland in the 
interest of the faith. Innocent III. exterminating 
the Albigenses, the Inquisition with its autos-da-fe, 
religious wars, Jesuitism, the St. Bartholomew, 
the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the 
Dragonades follow in due course. 

The Reformation, where it prevailed, got rid of 
Papal despotism, of sacerdotalism, of asceticism, 
of thaumaturgy, of saint worship, and presently of 
persecution. But it did not get rid of dogma. It 
rather fell back on dogma as a pledge of stability 
and security in place of the authority of the Church. 
It kept religious belief subject to political authority. 
That principle is professed in one case and more 
or less practised in all. The political influences 
of that hour are not very strong warrants for ever- 
lasting and universal truth. 

Mutual toleration and charity there may at once 
be to any extent, and they are invaluable. Of 
reunion there seems to be little hope otherwise 
than by going back from Alexandria, Nice, Con- 
stantinople, Rome, Geneva, Augsburg, Zurich, and 
Canterbury, to the hillside in Galilee and the moral 
revelation proclaimed there. But at all events 



THE CONFERENCE OF THE CHURCHES 1 63 

tests may at once be relaxed, and those who are 
elected and have been -equipped to act as our 
spiritual guides may be set at liberty to speak the 
truth. 

December, 1905. 



XXXV 

WHAT DO WE OWE TO THE OLD TESTAMENT? 

Kind "Orthodoxy/' taking pity on one gone 
astray, sends him a passage from the Old Testa- 
ment, striking enough, as " Orthodoxy '^ thinks, to 
have the effect upon him of a miraculous resur- 
rection from the dead. 

Of the changes that I have seen in a long life 
not one is more momentous than the change in 
the position of the Bible. As the collection of a 
national literature, intensely interesting and some- 
times spiritually grand, the Old Testament will 
live forever. As a supposed course of divine reve- 
lation it has yielded to critical inquiry. The 
reputed authorship of much of it has been dis- 
proved, and it has been shown to be a human 
mixture not only of that which is sublime with that 
which is the reverse of sublime, but of good with 
evil. Vain, surely, is the attempt to restore its 
unity and divinity by any application to its ethics 
of the Darwinian theory of evolution. Would 

164 



WHAT DO WE OWE TO THE OLD TESTAMENT? 1 65 

Deity in revealing itself to man stoop to personate 
the primitive delusions of the human mind and 
the lower stages of human morality? In what, 
after all, does the supposed evolution end? In 
persistent tribalism, in Pharisaism, in the crucifix- 
ion of the Great Teacher of Humanity, in the 
narrow ceremonialism of the Talmud. 

It might be difficult to say what on the whole 
the effect of belief in the inspiration of the Old 
Testament on character and progress has been. 
The opening of Genesis is sublime, as Longinus 
felt. It seems, compared with what follows, the 
work of a superior mind. But devout belief in it 
has barred, nearly down to our own day, rational 
inquiry into the history of the planet and the 
origin of man. Two generations ago scientific 
lecturers might be heard pitiably struggling to 
force science into conformity with faith. Then, 
from the grand "Let there be light !" we drop to 
the God who makes man of dust, woman of man's 
rib, and manufactures coats of skin for them. We 
have God walking in the garden in the cool of the 
evening. We have the Tree of Knowledge and 
the talking Serpent. The patriarchs living nine 
centuries, the giants, the Deluge with its infantine 



l66 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

delusions and impossibilities, the loves of the 
angels, and the Tower of Babel, are all on the 
level of the commonest mythologies. Yet they 
have clouded the mind of the most advanced 
members of the race. 

In the higher passages of the Prophets such as 
that cited by my orthodox well-wisher, we have 
grand manifestoes of faith in the God of righteous- 
ness, though we hardly find aspirations after 
spiritual self- culture, or, saving perhaps in pas- 
sages of the Psalms, anything like the tenderness 
of Christian ethics. There are glimpses, though 
only glimpses, of a universal religion. There is 
no glimpse anywhere of a life beyond the present, 
though there are allusions to a shadowy world of 
the dead. We have in the book of Job a deeply 
interesting effort to solve a mystery of the moral 
world, albeit with an abortive conclusion. We 
have the beauty of pastoral life and character in 
the book of Ruth; we have chivalrous affection 
in the friendship of David and Jonathan. In the 
Mosaic law, compared with the codes of the most 
civilized nations of antiquity, notable advances 
may be traced. 

On the other hand, we have the picture of a 



WHAT DO WE OWE TO THE OLD TESTAMENT? 1 6/ 

Deity covenanting to advance the interests of one 
tribe above those of the rest of mankind on the 
condition of the performance of a tribal rite, and 
thus stamping tribahsm as perpetual. We have 
a Deity prospering the craft of Jacob, hardening 
the heart of Pharaoh so that he will not let Israel 
go, and then slaying all the guiltless firstborn of 
the Egyptians; sanctioning predatory invasion of 
Canaan and extermination of its people; making 
the sun to stand still in heaven that the slaughter 
may be complete ; approving the treason of Rahab, 
the murder of Sisera, and the hewing of Agag in 
pieces ; chronicling without condemnation David's 
putting to a death of torture the people of a 
captured city; prompting the butchery of all the 
prophets of Baal ; sending forth a lying spirit to 
betray King Ahab to his ruin ; causing forty chil- 
dren, for mocking a prophet, to be torn to pieces 
by bears. It can hardly be doubted that these 
presentations of Deity and the divine government 
have had their effect on the character of men, that 
they are partly responsible for the darker features 
of Puritanism and for the use of persecuting force 
in the supposed interest of religion. 

"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." What 



1 68 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

crimes and horrors followed in the train of the 
dark superstition which had its fancied warrant in 
those words! 

The idea of a Chosen People still lingers and 
leads to aberrations. Perhaps the tribalism of 
which it is the Hebrew version may not have been 
without its effect in maintaining too sharp a dis- 
tinction between Christendom and the rest of 
humanity. 

It may be difficult to strike the balance. What 
is certain is that free inquiry has at length pre- 
vailed over tradition and empowered us to choose 
the good, of which there is rich store, such as the 
passage tendered for my conversion, in the Old 
Testament, and eschew the evil. 

What is the relation of the Old Testament to 
the New ? The Sanhedrim, for its part, gave that 
question a decisive answer. Devotees of Judaism 
have spoken of Christianity as its supplement. 
The relation is difficult to define, but to the pupil 
of Gamaliel the religion of Jesus was evidently a 
new dawn and a new life. We have Judaism still 
before us perpetuating its lingering tribalism by 
the tribal rite; refusing to blend with the races 
among which it dwells ; to intermarry with them ; 



WHAT DO WE OWE TO THE OLD TESTAMENT? 1 69 

to break bread, if it can help, with them; treating 
that which is unclean for itself as clean for them ; 
celebrating the feast of Purim in memory of its 
ancient feud. I speak, of course, of the strict 
and Talmudic Jew as he is found in Russia or 
Poland, not of those whom the Sun describes as 
having undergone American influence and be- 
come practically citizens of the American republic, 
or rather perhaps of the world, and not Tal- 
mudists, but simply theists. 

December, 1905. 



XXXVI 

JUSTICE HEREAFTER 

Or Professor Osier's "Counsels and Ideals," 
which came into my hands the other day, the bulk 
is professional. But at the end are some pages 
on religion, death, and immortality. The illus- 
trious professor rather affects the peculiar style 
which fascinates us in the writings of the doubting 
philosopher, Sir Thomas Browne. Yet his senti- 
ments can hardly be mistaken. "As a rule, man 
dies as he had lived, uninfluenced practically by 
the thought of a future life." "The Preacher was 
right: in this matter man hath no preeminence 
over the beast. ^ As one dieth, so dieth the other.' " 
In these sentences we have the keynote. At death, 
then, it matters nothing whether a man has been 
the benefactor or the scourge of his kind, the best 
of citizens or the worst of malefactors, the most 
self-denying of philanthropists or the grossest of 
voluptuaries ; nor for the myriads who by no fault 
of their own have suffered and perhaps suffered 
patiently in this life is there any hope of compen- 

170 



JUSTICE HEREAFTER I /I 

sation hereafter. This is a doctrine which, Hke 
other doctrines, if it isj)roved must be accepted, but 
of which we should naturally wish to see the proof. 
The unhappy and the oppressed assuredly will. So 
will those who are losing the objects of their love. 
If the opposite belief depended on stories of 
death-bed visions or on the emotions of the dying, 
the task of the sceptic would be easy. But to 
rest the case on the attitude at death is surely 
to look in a wrong quarter. It is in the liv- 
ing and healthy conscience that the intimation, 
not of immortality, which, strictly speaking, is 
inconceivable and therefore undemonstrable, but 
of a future existence, is to be sought. Conscience 
appears, in all in whom it has not been seared and 
silenced, to speak of a supreme justice, the awards 
of which are not limited to this world and which 
is not to be bafHed, as in numberless cases earthly 
justice is, by the power or arts of the evildoer. 
That this idea is not constantly and distinctly 
present to the minds of men is no conclusive 
proof of its falsehood. If it is not constantly and 
distinctly present as the expectation of another 
life, it is present as the voice of morality in con- 
flict with temptation. 



172 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

Professor Osier's point of view, if I read him 
aright, seems to be that of a thoroughgoing 
evolutionist. Like other thoroughgoing evolu- 
tionists, he seems to assume that life is self-gen- 
erated in the germ-plasm. But self-generation is 
inconceivable. There must have been something 
to indue that particle with generative force. Ex- 
treme evolutionists seem also to assume that con- 
tinuity of development precludes essential change. 
"The individual," says Dr. Osier, "is nothing 
more than the transient offshoot of a germ-plasm, 
which has an unbroken continuity from generation 
to generation, from age to age." But if there is 
not essential change from the germ-plasm to 
Newton or to the highest example of spiritual 
aspiration, what change is essential? The un- 
folding may not be entirely from within. It may 
be due to influence from without. Once more, 
the evidence of our bodily senses may not be an 
exhaustive revelation of the universe. At all 
events, it seems difficult to maintain that continuity 
of development precludes essential change, or that 
an ascending series of states commencing in the 
germ-plasm might not cuhninate in spiritual life. 

January, 1906. 



XXXVII 

OUR PRESENT POSITION 

No candid reader, I hope, can have supposed 
that these letters were penned by an enemy to 
reHgion, though they may have frankly admitted 
the difficulties of belief. Their writer was moved 
by the gravity of the crisis, social as well as politi- 
cal, so great a part having been socially played by 
religion. He has been attempting to define the 
position, drawing the line between that which 
must be abandoned and that which is left, trying 
to guard against the proclivities of the hour and 
pleading for perfect freedom of inquiry, especially 
on behalf of the clergy, an order set apart and 
specially qualified for spiritual work. 

There has been no more attack in these letters 
upon any particular religion than upon religion in 
general. Nothing of that kind could have been 
offered to the Sun. 

Thus we stand. From highly educated and 
perfectly open minds the behef in the Bible as an 

173 



174 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

inspired volume on which the Christian world had 
been resting seems to have departed. We are left 
with the collected body of Hebrew literature, pro- 
foundly interesting, profoundly important, forming 
on the whole an upward step in the movement of 
humanity, but varying with the different authorships 
in elevation as well as in literary character, and 
marred in parts by tribalism and by the primitive 
morality of early times which, being taken for the 
divine morality, has wrought much evil. 

Few now deny that Genesis is mythical. The 
dogmatic part of Christianity must apparently 
share its fate. If there was no Fall of Man, there 
could be no occasion for an Atonement, no room 
for an Incarnation. The sophistication of the 
myth in Genesis to which apologists rescrt is 
surely hopeless. The evidence of the Gospel 
miracles, and notably of the Resurrection, has 
given way under critical examination. But there 
still remain to us the character of Jesus and his 
teachings, with the record of the effect of those 
teachings, so far as they have been allowed fair 
play, on human character and progress. The 
barrier between Christendom and Heathendom is 
falling. The liberal theism of the Christian begins 



OUR PRESENT POSITION 1 75 

to join hands with the liberal theism of the 
Hindu. 

On the optimist theism of Leibnitz or the Bridge- 
water Treatises we can rest no more. Science 
has revealed much in the heavens as well as on 
earth, and forced us to see on earth many things, 
such as the ruthless waste of animal life, to which 
we had before shut our eyes. Evidently, if in the 
government of the universe perfect benevolence 
and justice are combined with omnipotence, the 
benevolence must be in the ultimate design. A 
hint of that kind our own consciousness may supply 
in our feeling that effort is essential to moral per- 
fection. The movement, in the case of humanity 
at least, is on the whole upward and onward; 
while through the nobler part of our nature, with 
its pure affections, its poetry and tenderness, and 
even through the beauty of the earth and the glory 
of the starry skies, a spirit seems to commune and 
sympathize with ours. Metaphysical arguments 
will not hold. That a thing cannot be conceived 
by us may be a proof only of our mental limitations. 
But certainly nothing can to us be more incon- 
ceivable than the generation of mind and spirit 
from matter. '^No man hath seen God at any 



176 IN QUEST OF LIGHT 

time." Such, apart from the intimations of 
conscience, appears to be the sum of our present 
knowledge respecting the Power which rules the 
universe. From the uniformity of natural law 
we infer the unity of its author. Hypotheses non 
'jingo was the motto of Newton, which in this 
matter it will be specially well for us to observe. 
The belief seems to be gaining ground that life 
beyond the grave is a fond illusion, at best a pla- 
tonic speculation; that man at the last lies down 
and dies like the dog; that death consequently 
cancels all moral distinctions and levels the great- 
est benefactor with the worst enemy of his kind. 
The old arguments in favor of the doctrine of 
immortality, derived from the separate existence 
and indiscerptibihty of the soul, such as were used 
by Bishop Butler, physiology, it must be owned, 
has swept away. There remains to us the testi- 
mony of conscience, telling us that as we do well 
or ill in this life it will be well or ill for us in the 
end. No more, in fact, was told us by the Founder 
of Christendom, whose words concerning a future 
state, notably the story of Dives and Lazarus, 
are homily and imagery, not revelation. But the 
voice of conscience has not yet been explained 



OUR PRESENT POSITION 1 77 

away. From the fear of the Dantean hell, and 
the hideous idea of God as an eternal torturer, 
which it involves, the world has been set free. 

It seems premature to assume that the visible 
beginning of life is its origin, or that the material 
character of the germ necessarily limits the devel- 
opment and bars a spiritual outcome as the end. 
Always we have to remember that our knowledge 
is bounded by our senses, and that we may be in 
a world quite other than that which sense reveals. 

In the ministries of the different churches are 
a number of men, dedicated to a spiritual caUing, 
whose character and learning, if they were free, 
might be very helpful. But they are in bondage 
to tests under which many of them writhe, resort- 
ing to shifts of interpretation whereby they do 
more harm than good. It is surely in the interest 
of all who desire the truth that clerical thought 
and speech should be set free. 

Such in general outline appears to be our pres- 
ent position. There is no use in paltering with 
its facts or concealing its difficulties. Nor is 
there any way of salvation for us but unwavering 
and untrammelled pursuit of truth. 

February, 1906. 

N 



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